•  ;;*;  -  ;   •;..-.. 

Prejudices 

Charles  Macomb  Flandrau 


LIBRARY 

OF  THK 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

Class 


PREJUDICES 


PREJUDICES 


BY 
CHARLES    MACOMB    FLANDRAU 

Author  of  "Viva  Mexico  !  "  "The  Diary  of  a 
Freshman,"  "Harvard  Episodes,"  etc. 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 
D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

IQII 


COPYRIGHT,  1911,  BY 
D.   APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


Published 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


\  1  1 


These  extracts  from  my  notebook  origi 
nally  appeared  in  The  Bellman.  For  per 
mission  to  reprint  them  I  beg  to  thank 
the  editor. 

C.  M.  F. 


220994 


A   BIRTHDAY   PRESENT 
FOR 

R.   B.  F. 


CONTENTS 


SOME  DOGS   .       .  - 

«5 

LITTLE  PICTURES  OF  PEOPLE    ....  2i 

WANDERLUST 43 

TRAVEL  •              69 

FELLOW  PASSENGERS 87 

PARENTS  AND  CHILDREN 99 

WHAT  Is  EDUCATION? II5 

JUST  A  LETTER I3I 

IN  THE  UNDERTAKER'S  SHOP    .       .       .       .  I5I 

WRITERS l6? 

"ANN  VERONICA" Xg5 

HOLIDAYS .  207 

SERVANTS 223 

MRS.  WHITE'S 239 


SOME   DOGS 


SOME   DOGS 

WHEN  the  occasion  is  propitious,  I 
always  find  it  interesting  to  ask  a 
person  I  don't  know  well  if  he,  or 
she,  is  fond  of  dogs.  The  propitiousness  of 
the  occasion  is  perfect,  however,  only  when 
there  is  a  dog  in  the  same  room  or  on  the 
same  piazza,  or  wherever  we,  for  the  moment, 
happen  to  be  talking.  The  reply  to  this  ques 
tion  is  to  me  a  kind  of  exquisitely  personal 
barometer.  From  it  I  have  always  been  able 
to  gauge  with  extreme  accuracy  the  degree  to 
which  my  sympathy  and  friendship  with  him 
who  makes  it  might  possibly  rise.  False  an 
swers  to  other  questions  have  often  deceived 
me,  but  a  reply  to  the  inquiry :  Are  you  fond 
of  dogs?  never  has.  From  the  way  in  which 
the  reply  is  phrased,  from  the  tone  in  which  it 
is  spoken,  from  the  facial  expression  that  ac 
companies  it,  I  am  instinctively  able  to  "  size 

3 


PREJUDICES 

it  up,"  weigh  it,  and  see  exactly  what  there  is 
behind  it. 

From  otherwise  altogether  estimable  women 
I  often  elicit  this :  "  Oh,  yes,  I  like  dogs ;  but 
I  like  them  in  their  place."  This,  of  course, 
means  that  they  innately  loathe  dogs ;  that  they 
afe  afraid  of  them  and  have  a  horror  of  them ; 
that  they  regard  a  dog  as  something  which  po 
tentially  damages  furniture  and  carpets,  ruins 
flower  beds,  and  gives  children  hydrophobia. 
By  me,  anyone  who  descends  to  the  level  of 
declaring  that  he  "  likes  dogs,  but  likes  them 
in  their  place,"  is  simply  struck  from  the  list. 
It  is  a  most  usual  reply ;  it  might,  indeed,  in 
all  propriety,  be  added  to  the  bromidioms,  ex 
cept  that  a  bromidiom  is  more  a  stereotyped 
little  collection  of  words  that  slip  out  with  no 
particular  motive  or  intention,  whereas  a  dec 
laration  to  the  effect  that  one  likes  dogs,  but 
likes  them  in  their  place,  is  charged  with  mean 
ings  for  anyone  who  looks  for  them.  It  is  one 
of  those  curious  and  unexplained  facts  that  al 
most  nobody  likes  openly  to  confess  an  aver-« 
sion  to  dogs.  Among  our  acquaintances*  we 
4 


SOME    DOGS 

all  have  a  frank  and  vehement  enemy  of  cats, 
but  he  who  hates  dogs  rarely  permits  himself 
to  say  anything  more  definitely  antagonistic 
than  that  he  likes  dogs — in  their  place.  Un 
der  an  assumed  name  he  does,  from  time  to 
time,  relieve  himself  in  the  correspondence  col 
umn  of  a  newspaper,  but  it  is  invariably  under 
an  assumed  name.  If  I  disliked  dogs,  I  should 
not  hesitate  to  say  so,  just  as  I  do  not  hesitate 
to  admit  that  I  am  terrified  by  a  snake,  even  if 
I  know  it  to  be  harmless,  or  by  the  mere  idea 
of  ascending  to  a  great  height  and  peering  over 
the  edge.  Such  terrors  are  illogical,  unreas 
onable,  anything  you  please,  but  they  are  in 
born  and  they  persist,  and  few  persons  object 
to  confessing  to  them.  But  no  one,  on  the 
other  hand,  likes  to  have  it  believed  of  him 
either  that  his  sense  of  humor  is  not  keen,  or 
that  he  is  not  fond  of  dogs.  This,  of  course, 
is,  in  the  long  run,  all  to  the  glory  of  dogs. 
Even  the  people  who  constitutionally  dislike 
them  can  rarely  bring  themselves  openly  to 
say  so. 

To  me,  an  inability  to  love  a  dog  is  com- 

5 


PREJUDICES 

prehensible  only  in  the  same  sense  I  can  com 
prehend  that  an  uncle  of  mine,  who  had  a  de 
lightful  talent  for  drawing,  was  hopelessly 
color-blind,  and  that  another  member  of  my 
family  and  two  of  my  friends  are  what  is 
called  "  tone-deaf."  You  might  play  to  them 
the  introduction  to  "  Lohengrin "  and  then 
"  Annie  Rooney "  at  regular  intervals  every 
day  for  a  month,  and  at  the  end  of  that  time  it 
would  be  impossible  for  them  to  tell  which  was 
which.  In  other  respects  adequately  equipped, 
they  were  simply  born  without  the  apparatus 
necessary  to  distinguish  between  one  combina 
tion  of  musical  sounds  and  another.  They  all 
hate  to  admit  that  music  gives  them  little  or, 
no  pleasure ;  one  of  them  has  even  gone  so  far 
as  to  become,  in  an  amateur  way,  an  authority 
on  the  history  and  theory  of  music,  but  if  in 
his  presence  some  one  begins  to  play  the 
piano,  he  is  always  pathetically  unaware  as 
to  whether  he  is  listening  to  a  nocturne  by 
Chopin,  or  a  cakewalk  sung  into  popularity 
by  May  Irwin. 

Persons  who  "  like  dogs  in  their  place  "  al- 
6 


SOME   DOGS 

ways  seem  to  me  to  have  been  born  with  much 
the  same  sort  of  defect — or  perhaps  it  would 
be  kinder  and  truer  to  call  it  an  omission.  But 
then,  my  attitude  toward  dogs  may  be  abnor 
mal.  I  don't  know.  I  can  only  recall  a  lec 
ture  by  William  Dean  Howells  in  which,  when 
he  paused  to  give  some  incidental  advice  to 
young  writers,  he  said,  in  effect,  "  In  writing, 
never  hesitate  to  express  what  you  feel  is  a 
thought,  a  sensation  or  a  state  of  mind  peculiar 
to  yourself.  It  never  is  peculiar  to  yourself. 
The  paragraph  you  shrink  from  writing  be 
cause  you  feel  it  will  be  understood  by  you 
alone,  is  the  one  that  will  be  read  with  the 
most  sympathetic  interest."  (After  all  these 
years  I  cannot  quote  Mr.  Howells  verbatim, 
but  that  was  his  idea;  it  deeply  impressed  me.) 
So  here  goes. 

"  Love  "  is  a  portentous  word  that  we  use 
rather  recklessly,  but  in  considering  its  mean 
ing,  in  employing  it  after  the  deliberation  that 
is  its  due,  I  can,  in  all  seriousness,  say  that 
during  my  lifetime  I  have  .loved  more  dogs 
than  I  have  loved  human  beings.  There  are 

2  7 


PREJUDICES 

inevitably  a  few  humans  whom  we  love,  but, 
in  my  own  case,  I  simply  cannot  evade  the 
fact,  even  if  I  wanted  to  (which  I  don't),  that 
the  human  beings  I  have  been  unreservedly 
devoted  to  have  been  fewer  than  the  dogs  for 
whom  I  have  experienced  the  same  sort  of 
emotions.  What,  after  all,  do  we  mean,  in  of 
course  its  platonic  sense,  by  love?  To  me  it 
means  a  state  of  mind  that  would  be  tremen 
dously  upset  in  a  purely  disinterested  fashion 
by  the  sudden  elimination  of  somebody  else. 
It  means  that  somebody  has  become  part  of 
your  life,  part  of  your  thoughts,  part  of  your 
habits,  and  that  for  the  most  part  you  think 
of  him  or  her  or  it,  as  the  case  may  be,  with 
satisfaction.  You  like  to  know  that  "  they  " 
(whoever  they  are)  are  in  the  world  with  you. 
You  regret  your  partings  and  look  forward  to 
your  meetings.  You  stop  and  think,  some 
times,  how  different  life  would  be  if  they  died, 
and  when  they  die,  a  sort  of  hole  is  knocked 
into  your  world,  that  you,  for  a  long  time,  are 
unable  to  fill  up.  That  may  or  may  not  be  a 
good  definition  of  affection,  but  it  expresses 
8 


SOME    DOGS 

the  feeling  I  have  had  for  a  few  people  and  a 
lot  of  dogs. 

It  used  to  be  conventional  and  proper  to 
bring  up  children  in  the  belief  that  the  great 
difference  between  humans  and  the  so-called 
lower  animals  was  that  the  humans  had  souls 
and  that  the  other  animals  had  not,  but  now 
adays  many  parents  do  not  seem  to  care  to  as 
sume  the  responsibility  for  this  distinction,  and 
it  is  not  because  they  believe  we  haven't  souls 
(what  a  convenient  word  it  is!),  but  because 
they  are  inclined  to  suspect  that  the  kindly 
beasts  who  love  the  children  and  are  beloved 
by  them,  who  enjoy  such  intimate  companion 
ship  with  them,  have.  However  ihis  may  be, 
it  certainly  is  a  pleasanter,  a  more  ennobling 
theory ;  one  that  tends  to  reduce  human  vanity  A 
to  extend  sympathy,  to  increase  the  world's  \ 
happiness,  and  to  promote  a  more  specific  and 
comprehensive  interest  in  the  mysterious  and  I 
beautiful  ways  of  God. 

Most  unintentionally  I  seem  to  have  wan 
dered  from  dogs  and  strayed  into  the  domain 
of  metaphysics — or  do  I  mean  theology?  I 

9 


PREJUDICES 

don't  know  anything  about  metaphysics  or  the 
ology,  but  I  know  a  great  deal  about  dogs,  and 
it  was  some  dogs  I  had  in  mind  when  I  sat 
down  to  write.  Through  a  sad,  autumn  rain 
I  have  been  staring  out  of  my  window  into  the 
garden  where,  side  by  side,  some  of  them 
are  buried;  Friday,  Thursday,  Tatito,  Spy, 
Rowdy,  and — it  is  but  a  few  lonely  weeks  that 
he  has  been  there — Boozy.  Mud,  an  Irish 
staghound,  is  at  rest  on  a  hillside  in  Dakota, 
and  Jigger,  whom  I  rarely  see  now,  as  he  un 
fortunately  for  me  does  not  belong  to  me,  is 
fat,  gray,  capricious,  but  still  alive,  still  ador 
able  and  adored.  How  they  emerge  and  come 
back  to  me«as  I  stand  and  look  at  the  frost 
bitten  hollyhocks  on  the  graves!  What  indi 
viduality  each  one  had ;  how  absolutely  differ 
ent  they  were;  how  inseparable  they  are  from 
any  retrospect  of  my  youth — from,  indeed,  my 
whole  life.  With  but  few  intermissions  I  can 
not  remember  the  time  when  some  one  of  them 
did  not  play  an  intimate,  an  important,  a  mem 
orable  part  in  the  little  drama  of  my  existence. 
Scarcely  any  phase  of  it  fails  to  comprehend 
10 


SOME   DOGS 

one  of  them.  I  feel  myself  thinking  of  them 
exactly  as  I  think  of  the  members  of  my  fam 
ily  whom  I  have  cared  for,  who  did  what  it 
was  intended  that  they  should  do  and  who  then 
quietly  left.  To  describe  them,  to  dwell  on 
their  traits  of  character,  their  mannerisms, 
their  little  faults  and  eccentricities,  the  setness 
of  their  ways  as  they  gradually  grew  older  and 
then  old,  would  seem  to  me  to  be  an  indelicacy 
if  I  did  not  realize  that  to  most  persons  a  dog 
is  just  a  dog. 

Jigger  had,  and  still  has,  the  most  touching 
faith  in  the  efficacy  of  prayer.  When  he  needs 
or  wants  anything,  he  assumes  the  attitude 
and  waits  for  results.  If  he  is  thirsty,  one 
comes  upon  him  appealing  to  a  washstand  or 
to  a  faucet  in  the  bathroom ;  if  he  wants  a  cer 
tain  kind  of  salted  cracker  he  is  found  tired, 
but  patient,  believing,  and  erect  on  his  hind 
legs  in  front  of  the  cupboard  in  which  he 
knows  the  crackers  are  kept.  Once  in  the 
country  he  longed  for  a  porcupine  that  seemed 
to  him  an  altogether  congenial  sort  of  com 
panion,  and  begged  at  the  foot  of  a  tree  until 
II 


PREJUDICES 

the  porcupine  responded  by  coming  down  and 
shooting  twenty-four  quills  into  Jigger's  lovely 
little  plush  muzzle.  It  took  about  a  quart  of 
ether,  a  surgeon,  and  I  forget  how  many  dol 
lars,  to  extract  the  quills.  Jigger  also  keeps 
strange  hours.  Most  dogs,  I  have  found, 
adapt  their  hours  to  those  of  the  persons  they 
live  with.  They  go  to  bed  and  arise  when  the 
family  does,  but  Jigger,  although  a  dachshund, 
is  in  some  respects  Chinese.  Frequently  at 
two  or  three  in  the  morning  it  occurs  to  him 
that  it  would  be  agreeable  to  have  some  fun 
with  a  golf  ball.  The  fun  consists  in  some 
body  hiding  the  ball  in  a  sufficiently  discover 
able  locality  and  then  letting  Jigger  find  it. 
Perhaps  I  ought  to  be  in  an  institution  for  the 
feeble-minded,  but  when  Jigger,  at  3  or  4  A.M., 
has  deposited  a  moist  golf  ball  on  my  neck  and 
has  then  tugged  at  my  sleeve  until  I  woke  up, 
I  have  always  got  out  of  bed,  made  a  light, 
and,  half  dazed  with  sleep,  gone  through  all 
the  motions  of  his  idea  of  a  thoroughly  good 
time.  People  who  don't  like  Jigger — and  I 
have  begun  to  suspect  that  they  consist  of  the 

12 


SOME    DOGS 

people  whom  Jigger  cannot,  for  some  reason, 
endure — say  he  is  selfish.  No  doubt  he  is. 
Most  of  us  are,  only  some  of  us  have  learned 
how  to  conceal  the  fact.  Jigger  never  conceals 
anything  except  his  golf  ball.  That,  with  the 
air  of  a  conspiring  sausage,  he  sneaks  off  with, 
hides  from  mortal  view,  and  leaves  hidden 
sometimes  for  a  day  or  two  at  a  time. 

Friday  and  Thursday  were  part  of  my  life 
so  long  ago  that  I  find  I  can  now  speak  of  them 
with  calmness.  How  shy  and  reticent  and  ac 
tually  morbid  Friday  was!  He  had  none  of 
the  enthusiasms,  none  of  the  ebullience,  of 
other  dogs.  He  lived  with  us,  he  knew  he  was 
one  of  us,  he  never  temporarily  left  us  for  a 
day,'  as  almost  all  dogs  do  from  time  to  time. 
In  his  queer,  rather  uncomfortable  way  he 
worshiped  us;  I  know  he  did  because  I  know 
it,  but  he  never  actually  made  a  demonstration 
of  the  fact  as  other  dogs  do.  I  can't  remember 
a  single  occasion  on  which  he  kissed  my  hand 
or  asked  to  get  into  my  lap  or  my  bed.  Even 
in  his  youth  he  was  reserved  and  dignified  and 
old.  He  had  in  life  just  one  great  pleasure, 

13 


PREJUDICES 

one  dissipation,  and  that  was  to  hear  my  father 
argue  a  case  in  court.  He  almost  always  went 
to  the  court  room  when  my  father  had  a  case 
on  hand,  and  many  a  judge  has  angrily  or 
dered  him  to  be  removed ;  but  no  clerk  or  sher 
iff  ever  succeeded  in  removing  him.  Probably 
it  has  been  forgotten,  but  at  one  time  in  the 
legal  history  of  Minnesota  there  was  no  more 
prominent  figure  at  the  bar  than  a  queer,  shy, 
reticent,  morbid  but  determined  little  yellow 
dog  named  Friday! 

What  a  completely  different  personality  was 
Spy-boy!  An  English  greyhound  with  fa 
mous  ancestors,  he  was  physically  a  thing  of 
perfect  beauty — all  fine,  steel  springs  covered 
with  pale  brown  velvet.  When  he  stood  be 
tween  you  and  a  bright  light,  the  lower  part 
of  his  stomach  was  translucent,  and  you  could 
always  see  the  throbbing  of  his  heart.  Al 
though  both  by  birth  and  by  temperament  an 
aristocrat,  his  breeding  had  not  impaired  his 
intellect.  He  literally  had  a  fine  mind.  I 
think  of  him  as  a  kind  of  canine  Macaulay,  ex 
cept  that  he  had  about  him  a  touch  of  mysti- 


SOME   DOGS 

cism;  he  heard  sounds  and  smelt  odors  and 
saw  things  that  no  one  else  could.  For  hours 
at  a  time  I  have  sat  reading  in  the  same  room 
with  him,  an  absolutely  silent,  scentless,  unin 
habited  room  as  far  as  my  primitive  senses 
could  discover,  while  he,  poised  on  the  delicate 
arch  of  his  chest,  with  one  front  foot  across 
the  other  (he  always  assumed  that  position 
in  his  moments  of  meditation),  incessantly 
twitched  his  sensitive  nostrils,  moved  his  ears, 
and  followed  about  the  room,  with  his  eyes, 
the  invisible  things  he  saw.  I  could  see  noth 
ing  except  what  I  knew  was  there;  he,  how 
ever,  could.  Sometimes  he  would  get  up, 
slowly  watch  them  until  they  disappeared,  and 
then  resume  his  position.  One  day,  after  he 
had  sat  this  way  for  an  hour  or  more,  he  arose, 
rested  his  head  for  a  moment  on  my  sister's 
lap,  and  then  fell  dead. 

How  Rowdy  admired  him!  Rowdy,  too, 
was  a  greyhound,  but  poor,  silly,  stupid  old 
Rowdy's  escutcheon  was  simply  a  grille  of 
bars  sinister.  His  humble,  self-sacrificing  at 
tachment  to  Spy  was  as  if  he  appreciated  that 
15 


PREJUDICES 

Spy  was  the  real  thing,  and  that  he  was  only 
a  clumsy  imitation.  Spy  was  kind  to  him ;  at 
times  it  seemed  to  me  that  Rowdy's  society 
even  mildly  amused  him,  but  his  kindness  was 
unmistakably  that  of  royalty  for  some  lowly 
and  devoted  dependent.  Rowdy  once  chewed 
the  front  cover  of  the  book  that,  in  those  days, 
I  cared  for  more  than  any  other :  "  Sir  Ed 
ward  Seaward's  Narrative,"  by  Jane  Porter. 
My  youthful  fury  was  extreme  when  I  found 
the  mutilated  volume  on  the  piazza,  but  even 
at  that  immature  epoch  my  emotions  were 
hopelessly  mixed.  I  longed  to  whip  Rowdy, 
because  it  seemed  to  me  that  my  favorite  book 
was  ruined,  but  when  he  came  up  to  me  with 
every  appearance  of  having  forgotten  the  in 
cident,  I  could  only  pat  his  head,  as  usual.  His 
vandalism  brought  tears  to  my  eyes,  and,  after 
twenty-three  years,  when  I  now  and  then  look 
at  the  chewed,  blue  cover  of  "  Sir  Edward 
Seaward's  Narrative,"  and  examine  the  little 
tooth  marks,  tears  still  sometimes  come,  but 
they  aren't  the  same  kind. 

And  now  they  are  all  asleep  under  the  frost- 
16 


SOME   DOGS 

bitten  hollyhocks,  which  I  have  turned  to 
look  at  more  than  once  since  I  sat  down  to 
write.  Boozy's  life,  his  dignified  old  age,  and 
his  death  are,  somehow,  too  recent  to  speak  of. 
I  should  like  to,  but  I  can't. 


LITTLE   PICTURES 
OF   PEOPLE 


LITTLE    PICTURES 
OF    PEOPLE 


MR.    AND    MRS.    PARKE 

THEY  both  looked  older  than  their 
years,  which  were  respectively  sixty 
and  fifty-seven,  and  this  was  largely 
due  to  the  ingrowing  life  they  had  always  led, 
the  influence  of  their  fine  old  house  on  Beacon 
Hill,  and  to  the  individuality,  the  eccentricity, 
of  Mrs.  Parke's  clothes.  The  house  was  of 
mellow9d  red  brick,  with  large,  square,  high 
rooms  containing,  one  was  at  first  inclined  to 
think,  very  little  besides  dignity  and  refined 
sunlight.  But  a  more  careful  inspection  while 
waiting  for  Mrs.  Parke  to  come  down  dis 
closed  a  rare  combination  of  comfort  and 

21 


PREJUDICES 

beauty.  The  sitting  room  in  which  she  and 
Mr.  Parke  usually  received  one  belonged  to  no 
period  and  had  no  "  color  scheme."  It  was 
merely  quietly  perfect  with  mahogany,  with 
harmonious  chintz,  with  a  few  very  authentic 
and  interesting  pictures,  such  as  an  early  paint 
ing,  remarkably  definite,  even  a  little  hard,  by 
Corot,  a  religious  arrangement  of  archaic  reds 
and  blues  by  Rossetti,  some  exquisitely  pains 
taking  botanical  and  architectural  pencil 
sketches  by  Ruskin,  and  a  panel  by  Whistler 
that  one  felt  to  be  important  without,  how 
ever,  knowing  just  what  it  was  intended  to 
represent.  In  the  center  of  the  room  was  a 
large,  round,  bare  mahogany  table  with  books 
arranged  on  it,  exactly  half  a  foot  away  from 
the  edge,  in  a  circle.  Inside  the  circle  was  al 
ways  a  great  crystal  bowl  full  of  flowers  that 
were  sent  into  town  every  morning  from  the 
Parkes'  country  place. 

Mrs.  Parke  suggested  a  vivacious  Queen 
Victoria,  if  such  an  image  is  conceivable.  She 
was  of  the  same  height  and  figure  and,  like  her 
late  majesty,  she  wore  strange  clothes  that 

22 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

were  not  exactly  out  of  fashion,  because  they 
had  never  been  in  it.  They  were  simply  the 
clothes  of  Mrs.  Parke  and  bore  no  relation  or 
resemblance  to  any  others.  She  had  a  great 
many  of  them,  for,  often  as  I  went  there  on 
Sunday  afternoons,  I  never  saw  the  same  gar 
ment  twice.  They  were  the  most  romantic 
clothes  I  have  ever  known  off  the  stage  or  out 
side  the  glass  cases  of  a  museum,  for,  many 
years  before,  Mrs.  Parke's  greatuncle  had  been 
an  East  India  merchant  and,  when  he  died, 
his  grandniece  inherited,  among  other  things, 
bale  upon  bale  of  the  marvelous  fabrics  his 
ships  had  brought  back  from  the  East — from 
India,  from  Burmah,  from  Siam,  Japan  and 
China;  silks,  brocades,  crepes,  cloth  of  silver 
and  cloth  of  gold  and  many  more  materials  that 
no  longer  had  names  and  the  secret  of  whose 
dyes  had  been  forgotten.  For  almost  forty 
years  Mrs.  Parke  had  dressed  only  in  these 
splendid,  brilliant  stuffs,  and  there  were  many 
bales  still  unopened.  Some  of  the  materials 
rustled  stiffly  and  some  of  them  clung,  but  she 
had  them  all  made  up  in  the  same  way,  a  kind 
3  23 


PREJUDICES 

of  loose  wrapper,  and  with  them  she  wore  on 
her  head  a  small  cap  of  rose  point,  the  top  of 
which  was  a  bit  of  the  dress. 

On  a  pedestal  in  the  hall  the  marble  bust  of 
a  handsome  young  man  still  faintly  suggestive 
of  her  husband  testified  that  the  Parkes  had 
been  to  Italy  on  their  wedding  trip,  but  they 
had  never  gone  abroad  again.  With  one  ex 
ception  their  journeys  for  thirty-six  or  -seven 
years  had  consisted  solely  of  the  annual  trip  on 
the  ninth  of  April  to  their  country  place,  a 
distance  of  eighteen  miles,  and  the  annual  trip 
back  to  town  again  on  the  tenth  of  November. 
Once  they  had  spent  two  weeks  with  a  sena 
torial  relative  in  Washington,  but  on  their  re 
turn  Mr.  Parke  had  nervous  prostration  for 
three  months  and  they  did  not  again  indulge 
in  so  daring  an  experiment. 

I  often  wondered  how  all  the  years  had 
slipped  by  without  somehow  leaving  them 
stranded,  for  neither  of  them  had  ever  "  done  " 
anything,  even  in  the  most  prosaic  interpreta 
tion  of  the  term.  Mr.  Parke  had  studied 
law,  but  he  had  never  practiced  it.  He  read 
24 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

widely,  memoirs,  poetry,  history,  essays  and 
an  occasional  novel,  and  he  remembered  much 
of  what  he  read,  but  his  reading  was  of  the 
desultory  kind.  He  could  quote  from  all  liter 
atures  but  he  had  no  literary  hobbies.  Mrs. 
Parke  did  not  even  read.  Instead  she  knitted 
soft,  useless  things  on  thick,  wooden  needles, 
and  when  she  was  in  the  country  armed  her 
self  with  a  flat  straw  hat,  chamois  gloves,  a 
pair  of  scissors,  and  then  proceeded  to  drive  the 
Scotch  gardener  to  drink.  They  had  never 
cared  much  for  society.  It  was  enough  to 
know  that  its  doors  were  open  to  them,  al 
though  at  one  period  Mr.  Parke  must  have 
gone  to  a  great  many  small  dinners  at  clubs  to 
meet  celebrities,  for  his  fund  of  intimate  and 
delightful  anecdote  was  inexhaustible. 

But  the  years  had  slipped  by  and  they  had 
not  been  stranded.  They  imagined,  indeed, 
that  they  always  had  been  and  still  were  two 
of  the  busiest  and  most  important  persons  in 
town.  They  were  sixty  and  fifty-seven  when 
I  first  met  them,  and  old  for  their  ages.  One 
scarcely  expected  them  to  be  very  actively 

25 


PREJUDICES 

occupied  with  the  contemporaneous,  but  after 
I  had  seen  them  often  enough  to  become  ac 
climated  (no  other  word  will  quite  do)  I  real 
ized  that  they  never  had  been,  that  they  were 
then  exactly  as  they  always  had  been,  only 
more  so.  Their  entire  lives  had  been  spent  in 
the  deification  of  the  unessential,  in  the  reduc 
tion  of  puttering  to  a  science.  They  had  put 
tered  their  lives  away  and  were  still  puttering, 
only,  as  they  grew  older,  with  a  greater  in 
tensity,  and  from  the  first  their  lives  had  been 
extremely  happy.  I  had  never  known  two 
human  beings  who  had  so  successfully  mas 
tered  the  art  of  transforming  molehills  into 
mountains.  It  was  their  sole  occupation. 

"  My  dear  fellow,  I  am  so  glad  to  see  you," 
Mr.  Parke  would  exclaim  as  he  bustled  into  the 
room  when  I  went  there  to  luncheon,  and  he 
meant  it,  for  they  were  both  kind  and  hos 
pitable.  "  I'm  afraid  I'm  a  minute  or  two  late, 
but  this  morn-ing  I've  been  driven,  positively 
driven,  from  the  moment  I  got  out  of  my 
bath — and  by  matters  I  simply  can't  trust  to 
anyone  else.  They  leave  me  no  time  for  any- 
26 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OE    PEOPLE 

thing ;  I  mean  the  things  I  like  to  do  and  want 
to  do.  But  you  remember  that  line  from 
Browning's  Paracelsus,  don't  you  ?  '  Let  each 
task  present  its  petty  good  to  thee.'  I  always 
try  to  think  of  that." 

"  You've  worked  too  hard  this  morning, 
Henry,"  Mrs.  Parke  would  say,  glancing  solic 
itously  up  from  her  needles,  "  and  you  know 
it  always  brings  on  your  gout.  The  trouble  is, 
he  will  overdo."  Later  on,  during  luncheon, 
it  comes  out  that  the  exhausting  labors  of  the 
day  consisted  of  Mr.  Parke's  making  out  and 
sending  a  check  to  the  associated  charities, 
writing  a  short  letter  to  the  Transcript,  refus 
ing  an  invitation  to  dinner,  and  changing  his 
clothes.  Mrs.  Parke  had  also  spent  an  excit 
ing  but  difficult  morning.  A  new  expressman 
had  delivered  the  daily  box  of  flowers  at  the 
wrong  house,  and  from  the  dear  lady's  account 
of  the  incident  one  inferred  that  for  several 
hours  the  destiny  of  nations  had  shuddered  in 
the  balance. 

"  I  sat  and  sat  and  sat,"  she  would  dramat 
ically  declaim,  "  but  no  expressman.  I 
27 


PREJUDICES 

couldn't  understand  it,  and  it  was  long,  long 
past  the  time  when  I  ought  to  have  been  ar 
ranging  the  flowers.  You  can  imagine  the 
state  I  was  in." 

One  of  Mr.  Parke's  resources  was  changing 
his  clothes.  In  the  country,  for  instance,  he 
dressed  with  his  usual  minuteness  for  break 
fast,  but  if  the  gardener  sent  word  that  an 
orchid  had  bloomed,  or  that  a  branch  on  one 
of  the  trees  was  turning  yellow  before  it 
ought  to,  or  that  some  Sunday  tripper  had 
left  a  sardine  tin  and  two  eggshells  on  the 
cliff  walk — if,  in  fact,  he  felt  it  imperative  to 
leave  the  house  even  for  a  short  time,  the  act 
necessitated  a  change  of  costume.  He  would 
put  on  tweed  knickerbockers  and  a  kind  of 
shooting  jacket.  On  his  return  he  would 
change  again  to  still  another  suit  for  luncheon, 
afterwards  the  tweeds  again  if  he  went  for 
a  walk,  then  something  else  for  tea  and,  finally, 
evening  dress  for  dinner.  They  both  also 
spent  a  great  deal  of  time  in  showing  and  ex 
plaining  their  two  houses  to  visitors — the 
closet  doors  that  could  not  possibly  slam,  be- 
28 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

cause  their  area  had  been  exactly  adjusted  to 
the  resistance  of  the  number  of  cubic  feet  of 
air  inside,  or  words  to  that  effect;  the  venti 
lating  apparatus  that  forced  every  lungful  they 
breathed  through  three  thicknesses  of  steril 
ized  cheese  cloth;  the  heating  arrangements 
that  did  something  quite  uncanny,  I  forget 
what. 

"  You  have  seen  the  unceasing  labor  of  forty 
years,"  Mr.  Parke  would  usually  assure  you 
when  you  had  finished  the  tour  of  inspection. 
Their  greatest  triumph,  however,  consisted  of 
the  fact  that,  when  they  left  town  for  the 
country  on  April  the  ninth,  they  took  no  lug 
gage  with  them,  not  even  a  small  handbag. 
They  drove  to  the  station  empty  handed,  and 
on  arriving  at  their  destination  resumed  their 
existence,  as  it  were,  in  duplicate.  To  the 
least  detail  there  were  replicas  of  every  gar 
ment,  every  shoe,  every  toilet  article,  every 
skein  of  worsted  and  every  book  the  two 
possessed. 

The  last  time  I  saw  them  they  had  both 
aged  considerably  and  they  were,  if  possible, 
29 


PREJUDICES 

more  "  driven  "  than  usual.  A  distant  cousin 
had  written  that  he  expected  to  pass  through 
town  on  his  way  to  Europe,  that  he  wanted  to 
see  them  both  and  would  like  to  stay  all  night 
at  their  house.  With  the  letter  in  her  agitated 
hand  Mrs.  Parke  despairingly  appealed  to  me. 

"  But  how  can  we  ?  "  she  wailed,  as  one  of 
the  two  men  servants  who  had  brought  in  the 
tea  things  quietly  restored  a  book  I  had  disar 
ranged  to  its  geometric  site  on  the  mahogany 
table.  "  I  don't  see  how  we  can.  We've  been 
back  from  the  country  for  only  three  weeks, 
and  the  house  is  in  a  perfect  whirl !  "  I 
thought  of  the  eight  immense,  unoccupied  bed 
rooms  upstairs,  and  for  a  moment  had  visions 
of  my  own  family  sleeping  on  the  floor  or  in 
the  bath-tub  or  on  the  sewing  machine  in 
order  to  make  room  for  unexpected  guests. 
But  I  agreed  that  the  distant  cousin  was  most 
inconsiderate,  not  to  say  unreasonable. 

Mr.  Parke  came  in,  but  could  only  shake  my 
hand  and  apologize  for  running  away.  For  a 
month  he  had  been  worrying  for  fear  the 
family  tomb  in  Mount  Auburn  cemetery  might 

30 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

be  "  damp  "  and  he  had  at  last  decided  that 
the  only  thing-  to  do  was  to  drive  out  there  and 
"  see  for  himself." 


II 

THE    FOURTH 

TWICE  a  day  the  fourth  officer  walked 
rapidly  the  length  of  the  promenade  deck  with 
an  easy,  swinging  stride  and  then  vanished  up 
a  steep  flight  of  steps  that  led  to  the  bridge. 
These  brief  appearances  began  to  interest  me, 
for  he  was  extraordinarily  young  and  good- 
looking,  and  it  seemed  to  me  but  natural  that 
he  should  at  least  say  good  morning  to  some 
of  the  young  girls  who  gazed  at  him  over 
the  tops  of  their  books  as  he  went  by  and 
who  very  clearly  would  have  enjoyed  making 
his  acquaintance.  But  he  never  stopped  and  he 
never  spoke.  It  was  not  until  the  fifth  day 
out  that  he  smiled  gravely  and  saluted  as  he 
passed  my  chair.  The  next  day  we  anchored 
in  a  landlocked  tropical  harbor,  and  as  he  was 


PREJUDICES 

on  duty  at  the  top  of  those  wobbly  steps  (I 
never  am  able  to  remember  the  nautical  name 
for  anything)  by  which  one  descends  against 
the  side  of  the  ship  to  the  launches,  and  as 
there  was  nothing  for  him  to  do  after  he  had 
assured  himself  that  none  of  the  fat  ladies  and 
old  gentlemen  who  were  going  ashore  had 
fallen  into  the  sea,  he  strolled  out  of  the  broil 
ing  sun,  where  he  had  been  standing,  immacu 
late  and  amiable,  for  two  hours  and  a  half, 
and  came  over  to  me. 

I  am  not  exactly  a  punctilious  person,  espe 
cially  on  a  hot  day  in  the  tropics,  but  as  the 
Fourth  did  not  sit  down  on  any  of  the  numer 
ous  vacant  chairs  in  my  neighborhood  I,  some 
what  to  my  surprise,  found  myself  standing  up 
—standing  up,  as  I  rarely  was  inspired  to  do 
in  the  presence  of  the  captain ;  and  the  Fourth 
was  almost,  if  not  quite,  young  enough  to  be 
my  son.  He  took  my  involuntary  display  of 
respect  for  himself  and  his  white  uniform  as 
a  matter  of  course,  and  as  the  launches  were 
not  to  return  for  an  hour  we  leaned  against 
the  rail  on  the  shady  side  and  talked,  some- 

32 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

times  in  English  (his  English  was  correct,  al 
though  limited)  but  more  often  in  German. 
That  was  the  beginning  of  my  acquaintance 
with  the  Fourth,  one  that  continued  under 
similar  circumstances  for  several  months  and 
proved  in  many  respects  to  be  enlightening. 

More  than  anything  else,  perhaps,  it 
brought  home  to  me  the  meaning  of  discipline 
long  continued.  He  had  learned  his  profession 
on  a  German  training  ship,  starting  in  at  the 
age  of  fourteen,  and  from  there  he  had  gone 
to  the  navy.  Now  he  was  an  officer  on  one 
of  the  great  German  passenger  ships.  In  the 
meanwhile  he  had  found  time  to  take  and  pass 
the  naval  examinations  that  made  him  eligible 
to  the  command  of  a  German  vessel  in  any  part 
of  the  world,  and  his  age  was  just  twenty- 
four. 

I  confess  I  gasped  when  I  heard  it  (it  was 
the  second  officer  who  told  me),  although  I 
ought  to  have  known  it  without  being  told,  for 
from  the  first  I  had  been  struck  by  his  impec 
cable  physical  refinement,  the  kind  that  but 
rarely  survives  a  quarter  of  a  century.  After 

33 


PREJUDICES 

that,  when  he  was  quietly  giving  orders  to 
middle-aged  quartermasters,  skilfully  directing 
the  movements  of  the  launches,  making  mathe 
matical  calculations  on  a  slip  of  paper  behind 
the  compass  at  sunset  or  pacing  the  bridge,  I 
often  found  myself  contrasting  him  with  vari 
ous  other  young  gentlemen  of  twenty-four 
some  five  or  six  thousand  miles  away.  Living 
night  and  day  with  his  watch  practically  in  his 
hand,  rarely  sleeping  more  than  four  hours  at 
a  time,  obeying  orders  and  observing  regula 
tions  blindly,  faithfully,  without  a  question  or 
even  a  thought,  had  done  something  to  him 
that  was  to  me  very  curious,  very  interesting 
and  very  fine.  It  had  not  crushed  him,  it  had 
molded  him.  It  had  not  changed  his  nature, 
it  had  taken  charge  of  it  and  directed  it.  It 
had  not  in  the  least  made  him  prematurely  old, 
it  had  developed  to  the  fullest  extent  the  capa 
cities  of  his  youth. 

He  was  so  reserved,  so  self-contained  at  first, 

that  I  wondered  if  he  was  not  perhaps  just  a 

beautiful   piece   of  Teutonic  machinery,  until 

one  morning  we  steamed  into  a  harbor  where 

34 


LITTLE    PICTURES   OF    PEOPLE 

the  company  he  served  had  met  with  the  most 
hideous  ill  luck.  He  pointed  out  to  me  the 
dismantled  hulls  of  two  noble  ships  that  had 
run  ashore  and  were  a  total  loss.  One  of  them 
had  struck  because  it  was  impossible  for  any 
one  on  board  to  know  that  an  earthquake  had 
destroyed  the  lighthouse  the  day  before;  the 
other  lay  tragically  on  its  side  among  the 
breakers  because  the  captain  had  attempted  to 
hit  the  channel  in  the  dark  without  a  pilot. 
The  Fourth  had  been  on  that  ship  at  the  time 
and,  when  he  told  me  about  it,  I  had  to  occupy 
myself  with  my  field  glasses  and  pretend  I 
didn't  know  that  two  large  tears  had  welled 
up,  slipped  over  and  were  finding  their  way 
down  his  face.  He  had  been  off  duty  and 
asleep  when  the  accident  happened,  and  knew 
nothing  about  it  until  the  quartermaster  woke 
him  up,  told  him,  and  said  that  the  captain 
could  not  be  found.  In  spite  of  the  fact  that 
the  captain's  room  was  dark,  something  im 
pelled  the  Fourth  to  enter. 

;<  Just  inside  the  door,  my  foot  slipped  on 
something,"  he  said,  "  and  when  I  turned  on 

35 


PREJUDICES 

the  light — "  .  .  .  Well,  immediately  after 
the  accident  the  captain  had  blown  the  top  of 
his  head  off  with  a  rifle. 

"  Under  exactly  the  same  circumstances 
would  you  have  done  the  same  thing?"  I 
asked  the  Fourth. 

"  Oh,  yes,"  he  answered  simply,  "  but  I 
should  have  waited  until  I  got  all  the  passen 
gers  safely  on  shore."  He  was  far  from  be 
ing  a  phlegmatic  German  machine.  As  I 
grew  to  know  him  well  I  saw  that  he  was  high- 
strung  and  nervous,  that  he  \vas  after  all  just 
twenty-four  with  the  longings  and  aspirations, 
the  excellent  discontent  of  an  intelligent  and 
spirited  boy.  It  was  all  there  but  it  was  under 
admirable  control.  It  had  been  trained  to 
obey,  and  not  to  command,  the  Fourth. 

His  existence  was  in  many  ways  an  ex 
tremely  lonely  one,  and  all  the  more  so  because 
it  was  passed  within  touching  distance  of  a 
gay,  rich,  pleasure-seeking  crowd,  with  which, 
it  was  an  understood  thing  by  the  company, 
he  was  to  have  no  friendly  relations. 

"  On  a  long  voyage  like  this,  where  we  stop 

36 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

every  few  days  and  I  stand  here  on  duty,  it's 
different.  I  can  talk  to  people  now  and  then 
and  get  to  know  them,  just  as  I  know  you,  but 
on  the  seven-day  trips  across  the  Atlantic  I 
never  speak  to  a  soul.  Often,  when  there  are 
five  or  six  hundred  passengers  on  board,  I 
never  even  see  one  of  them  all  the  way  over. 
I'm  either  on  the  bridge,  or  asleep,  or  in  my 
room,  or  on  our  own  deck.  We're  supposed  to 
stay  on  our  own  deck  when  we  have  nothing 
to  do/' 

It  was  also,  judged  by  material  standards, 
a  discouraging  existence.  There  had  been  oc 
casions  when  for  hours  at  a  time  the  Fourth 
had  been  chiefly  responsible  for  the  safety  of 
hundreds  of  lives  and  about  a  million  dollars' 
worth  of  property;  and  for  his  expert  knowl 
edge,  his  anxiety,  his  prolonged  nervous  strain 
he  received  the  munificent  salary  of  twenty- 
eight  dollars  a  month — but  little  more  than 
enough  in  the  tropics,  where  he  had  to  put  on 
always  one,  and  sometimes  two  suits  of  white 
a  day,  to  pay  his  laundry  bills. 

"  Nobody  but  the  stewards  get  rich  at  sea," 

37 


PREJUDICES 

he  laughed  when  we  were  discussing  the 
matter. 

"  Do  you  ever  think  of  giving  it  up — of 
doing  something  else  ?  "  I  asked  him. 

"  I  think  of  it,"  he  answered,  "  but  I  know 
I  shan't.  I  like  to  look  forward  to  having  a 
command,  although  I'll  probably  be  eighty 
when  I  get  one  and  too  old  to  take  it,  and, 
besides,  what  could  I  do?  I've  been  on  the 
bridge  of  a  ship  since  I  was  fourteen.  I  don't 
know  how  to  breathe  inside  of  a  house." 

When  we  were  in  port  and  he  could  get  off, 
we  now  and  then  dined  together  on  shore  and 
went  to  a  show.  By  way  of  returning  these 
small  hospitalities  he  did  the  only  thing  he  very 
well  could  do,  which  was  to  ask  me  to  go  to 
his  room  in  the  evening  to  have  a  glass  of 
beer.  This  I  liked  infinitely  better  than  an 
evening  spent  in  the  restaurant  or  the  theater 
of  some  sultry  South  American  town.  His 
room  was  large  and  cool,  high  up  and  forward, 
with  neither  a  sound  nor  a  vibration.  It  al 
ways  seemed  to  be  detached  from  the  world, 
suspended  in  some  way  between  the  sea  and 

38 


LITTLE    PICTURES    OF    PEOPLE 

the  sky,  and  in  it  the  Fourth,  when  he  got  to 
know  me  better,  felt  at  liberty  to  wear  his  sec 
ond  cleanest  white  ducks  instead  of  his  first, 
to  sprawl  on  the  sofa,  to  play  with  his  pet 
monkey,  to  talk  nonsense  and  to  be  quite 
frankly  the  kid  he  really  was. 

One  evening  he  put  the  monkey  in  bed  with 
its  head  on  the  pillow,  drew  the  cover  up 
around  its  neck  and  stretched  out  beside  it. 
A  huge,  bare-footed  sailor  came  into  the  room, 
managed  in  some  inscrutable  fashion  to  take 
off  his  cap  with  a  glass  of  beer  for  me  in  one 
hand  and  a  cup  of  coffee  for  the  Fourth  in  the 
other,  placed  the  things  on  the  table  and  tip 
toed  out.  Somewhere  far  below  us,  young  men 
and  girls  were  waltzing  frantically  in  the  heat, 
women  were  dripping  over  games  of  bridge  as 
if  their  souls  depended  on  the  outcome,  men  in 
the  smoking  room  were  getting  drunk  and  call 
ing  one  another  names.  But  where  we  were 
it  was,  as  always,  cool  and  silent  and  peaceful. 
One  has  to  lead  some  kind  of  a  life,  and  as  I 
sat  there  thinking,  it  occurred  to  me  that,  even 
if  it  was  poorly  paid  and  at  times  lonely,  there 

4  39 


PREJUDICES 

was  something  very  sane  and  useful  and  good 
about  the  life  of  the  Fourth. 

In  a  little  while  he  would  look  at  his  watch 
and  exclaim  a  trifle  diffidently,  but  with  an  un 
mistakable  resumption  of  authority : 

"  It's  ten  o'clock,  you  must  go  now."  Then 
he  would  almost  instantly  fall  asleep,  sleep  for 
four  hours,  spend  four  more  alone  with  the 
trackless  waters  and  the  southern  stars,  bathe, 
breakfast  and  begin  another  day  with  a  clear 
brain,  steady  nerves  and  untroubled  eyes. 

As  often  happens  when  two  persons  have  re 
mained  silent  in  each  other's  presence  for  sev 
eral  minutes,  his  train  of  thought  was  iden 
tical  with  mine,  for  when  he  spoke  it  was  to 
say:  "  After  all,  I  do  like  it." 


WANDERLUST 


WANDERLUST 

THE  crew,  much  to  its  surprise,  was 
paid  off  at  Havana  and  furnished 
with  a  variety  of  explanations 
that  did  not  particularly  explain.  Most  of 
the  men  were  bitter  about  it,  but  Lan 
sing  and  Hayward  were  too  unsophis 
ticated,  too  new  to  the  ways  of  the  sea, 
to  realize  at  first  that  they  had  been  im 
posed  upon.  They  had  shipped  on  the 
wretched  little  steamer  in  New  York  in  a  sud 
den  and  curiously  belated  access  of  romanti 
cism.  For  Hayward,  who  was  twenty-three, 
had  worked  as  an  electrician  since  he  was  sev 
enteen,  and  Lansing,  who  could  scarcely  re 
member  a  time  when  he  had  not  driven  a  gro 
cer's  wagon,  was  twenty-four.  The  sea  had 
never  been  a  boyish  passion  with  them ;  they, 
indeed,  had  rarely  seen  it.  As  far  as  their 

43 


PREJUDICES 

previous  relations  with  it  had  been  concerned, 
New  York  might  almost  have  been  situated  in 
the  middle  of  a  Dakota  prairie.  Their  lives 
had  always  been  city  lives,  but  not  of  the  kind 
that  finds  its  way  into  popular  fiction.  For, 
in  expressing  themselves,  they  were  not  ac 
customed  to  employ  a  semi-unintelligible  jar 
gon  of  new  slang,  and  from  personal  ex 
perience  they  knew  almost  as  little  about  the 
Bowery  as  they  knew  about  the  sea.  Their 
vocabularies,  instead  of  being  large  and  florid, 
were  small  and  simple;  their  lapses  from  gram 
mar  were  too  usual  to  be  interesting.  They 
knew  a  few  streets  of  the  immense  place  ex 
ceedingly  well,  but  they  were,  for  the  most 
part,  lower-middle-class,  commonplace,  en 
tirely  respectable  streets.  They  both  had  lived 
at  home  and  worked  hard — conscientiously, 
one  would  say,  except  that  in  the  routine  of 
their  existences  conscience  played  but  little 
part.  They  had  worked  hard  from  habit,  from 
the  realization  that  they  could  easily  be  re 
placed  and  from  an  innate  desire  to  keep  their 
"  jobs." 

44 


WANDERLUST 

It  was  strange,  or  perhaps  it  wasn't  strange 
(How  do  I  know?),  that  the  sea  had  all  at 
once  irrelevantly  called  to  them.  If  they  had 
been  fond  of  reading,  their  embarkation  might 
plausibly  have  been  the  practical  attempt  to 
make  a  dream  come  true.  But  they  rarely  read 
anything  except  the  larger  headlines  of  one- 
cent  newspapers.  The  voluminous  literature 
of  adventure  in  foreign  countries,  of  a  wild, 
free  life  on  the  high  seas,  was  almost  as  un 
known  to  them  as  the  thing  itself.  And  yet, 
one  day,  they  went  to  sea. 

Early  in  April,  an  electric  car  smashed  into 
Lansing's  delivery  wagon  and  hurt  the  horse, 
to  say  nothing  of  the  wagon  itself  and  its 
valuable  contents.  The  fault  was  neither  Lan 
sing's  nor  the  motorman's,  but  the  grocer 
both  discharged  Lansing  and  collected  two 
hundred  and  fifty  dollars  from  the  street  rail 
way  company.  Out  of  employment,  Lansing 
saw  something  of  New  York.  He  had  been 
faithful  and  careful,  and  in  a  dumb,  uncom 
plaining  sort  of  way  he  felt  aggrieved  and  re 
bellious.  His  long,  aimless  walks,  during  the 

45 


PREJUDICES 

first  few  days  of  his  idleness,  sometimes  took 
him  to  the  water's  edge,  and  one  morning  he 
found  himself  on  a  Wall  Street  wharf,  just  as 
a  steamer  was  about  to  leave  for  the  tropics. 
Although  he  didn't  precisely  know  what  it  all 
meant,  the  experience  was,  somehow,  a  mov 
ing  one.  There  was  an  army  of  half-savage 
negroes — unlike  any  negroes  he  had  ever  seen 
— wheeling  baggage  on  trucks  and,  with  inco 
herent  yelps,  filling  with  freight  a  coarse  net 
of  rope  that  lifted,  swung,  sank,  disappeared, 
and  then  reappeared  limp  and  hungrily  empty. 
There  were  fat,  inexplicable  women  with  im 
probable  complexions,  accompanied  by  lean, 
sallow,  gesticulating  men,  who  darted  from 
their  trunks  to  the  ship  and  back  again  in  a 
frenzy  of  excitement;  and  there  were  smells. 
Lansing  did  not  know  it  (he  knew  very  little) 
but  it  was  the  smells  that,  vulgarly  speaking, 
"  did  the  business."  There  was  a  kind  of  back 
ground — a  fundamental  smell — of  pitch,  of 
tar,  of  resin ;  but  here  and  there,  protruding 
from  this,  as  he  strolled  up  and  down  the  long, 
inclosed  wharf,  was  the  rank,  searching  smell 


WANDERLUST 

of  unroasted  coffee,  the  fruity  fragrance  of 
pineapples,  *he  pungent  acidity  of  tomatoes, 
the  heavy  sweetness  of  vanilla.  As  each  odor 
came  to  him  he  inhaled  it  deeply,  curiously, 
and  for  him,  somewhat  excitedly. 

After  the  vessel  had  slipped  away  and  disap 
peared  around  the  corner  of  the  wharf,  Lan 
sing  had  emerged  with  the  intention  of  travers 
ing  Wall  Street  and  taking  an  uptown  car,  but 
a  young  and  slightly  drunken  sailor  from  a 
warship  in  the  harbor  had,  apropos  of  nothing 
at  all,  thrown  an  arm  about  his  waist  and  led 
him  to  a  saloon  across  the  way.  They  had 
together  only  a  glass  of  beer  apiece,  but  they 
had  sat  down  to  it  at  a  little  table  and  the 
sailor  had  talked. 

In  the  sphere  of  life  to  which  they  both  be 
longed  there  is  a  directness  and  a  frankness  in 
the  matter  of  intercourse  that  would  be  im 
possible  for  most  persons  higher  in  the  social 
order.  Lansing  had  made  many  acquaintances 
and  even  a  few  friends  by  speaking  or  being 
spoken  to  by  detached  young  men  of  his  own 
age  standing  on  street  corners.  Most  of  his 

47 


PREJUDICES 

acquaintances  among  girls  had  been  begun  in 
the  same  way.  They  had  spoken  to  him  or  he 
had  spoken  to  them — it  was  immaterial — and 
if  they  found  each  other  congenial  they  some 
times  met  again ;  sometimes  they  didn't.  But 
in  any  event  meeting,  talking,  parting,  in 
volved  nothing.  It  was  merely  an  incident, 
often  a  pleasant  one,  of  the  kind  the  so-called 
upper  classes  know  but  little.  It  seemed  per 
fectly  natural  to  Lansing  that  the  sailor, 
whom  he  never  had  seen  before  and  probably 
would  never  see  again,  should  offer  him  a 
glass  of  beer  and  tell  him  of  his  voyage  around 
the  world,  and  that  he  himself  should  respond 
with  his  accident,  his  discharge  from  the 
grocery — in  a  word,  his  "  troubles,"  as  he 
finally  called  them. 

"  A  sailor  has  no  troubles,"  the  other  de 
clared  as  they  got  up  to  go ;  and  he  altogether 
looked  it.  After  that,  Lansing  spent  most  of 
his  time  on  the  wharves  and  on  Sunday  after 
noon  he  took  Hayward  with  him. 

Hayward's  experience  and  education  was  as 
limited  as  his  friend's,  but  he  was  of  finer  clay. 


WANDERLUST 

What  Lansing  only  felt,  Hayward  both  felt 
and  translated  into  words. 

"  Gee,  look  at  them  turtles !  "  he  would  ex 
claim  at  a  row  of  the  huge,  gasping  tortured 
creatures,  lying  on  their  backs  and  bound  to  a 
board  by  ropes  punched  through  their  bleed 
ing  flippers.  "  They  come  out  of  the  water  to 
lay  eggs  in  the  sand,  and  then  you  run  out  of 
the  bushes  and  turn  them  over  on  their  backs 
with  a  pole.  I  bet  there's  money  in  turtles." 
Or,  "  Gosh,  what  a  lot  of  pineapples !  How 
would  you  like  to  go  down  there,  Lansing, 
where  it's  always  summer,  and  just  sit  around 
while  the  niggers  work,  and  send  millions  of 
pineapples  back  here  to  be  sold  at  fifty  cents 
apiece?  " 

"  Forty-five,"  corrected  Lansing,  who  had 
"  delivered  "  them  all  his  life,  but  who,  until 
recently,  had  impartially  given  them  the  same 
consideration  he  had  been  accustomed  to  be 
stow  upon  a  potato.  Once  they  stood  for  an 
hour  in  front  of  ten  cages  full  of  white  and 
yellow  cockatoos.  They  were  even  more  dis 
turbing,  more  convincing  than  the  incoherent 

49 


PREJUDICES 

negroes,  the  excitement  of  departure,  the  odor 
of  exotic  fruits. 

"  Down  there  you  can  see  them  flying 
around  wild,"  Hayward  meditated  aloud. 
"  Down  there ! "  The  words  began  to  mean 
wonderful,  incommunicable  things  to  both  of 
them.  "  Down  there  "  was  the  shimmering, 
beautiful,  hot,  mysterious  and  seductive  end  of 
the  earth  that  a  Frenchman  is  always  able  to 
evoke  for  an  instant,  when,  in  a  certain  lan 
guid,  reminiscent  tone,  he  pronounces  the 
words  "  la  bas." 

So  they  shipped  on  a  tramp  steamer  and 
after  a  week  they  had  been  paid  off  at  Havana. 
In  Havana  they  spent  an  entrancing  day  and 
evening  (Hayward  bought  an  imitation  dia 
mond  brooch  at  a  place  on  Obispo  street  where 
the  revolving  electric  lights  in  the  window 
elicited  the  last  glitter),  but  the  next  day  was 
a  good  deal  of  a  bore.  They  had  seen  the 
town,  there  was  no  point  in  seeing  it  over 
again,  and  they  were  unused  to  idleness.  Both 
of  them  wrould  have  jumped  at  the  opportunity 
of  returning  to  New  York,  but  as  no  oppor- 
50 


WANDERLUST 

tunity  of  doing  so  presented  itself  neither  of 
them  had  been  obliged  to  admit  it.  On  the 
third  day,  however,  they  did  move  on  to  Vera 
Cruz.  To  Hayward,  Vera  Cruz  was  a  name 
he  had  heard  (Lansing  had  never  even  heard 
it),  but  had  he  been  asked  what  country  it  was 
in  he  could  not  have  told.  He  had  an  idea  that 
it  was  near  New  Orleans  and  Galveston.  In 
another  week  they  were  there — paid  off  again 
and  turned  loose  in  the  Plaza. 

Again  they  spent  a  notable  day.  They 
wandered  about  the  streets,  they  went  to  a 
wedding  in  a  church,  they  marveled  at  the 
unmolested  buzzards  filching  garbage  from  the 
open  drains  along  the  curbstones,  they  walked 
at  sunset  to  the  end  of  the  long  breakwater  and 
watched  the  fishermen  come  in  with  their 
gorgeous  catch  of  redsnapper.  In  the  evening 
they  went  to  a  moving-picture  show  where 
they  saw  a  realistic  bull  fight  and  a  manu 
factured  American  train  robbery.  (This  last 
gave  them  their  first  twinge  of  homesickness; 
the  Pullman  cars  and  the  passengers  looked 
so  natural.)  When  it  was  over,  they  again 


PREJUDICES 

sought  the  Plaza,  where,  in  the  sultry  air,  a 
compact  mass  of  people  was  slowly  forcing  its 
way  around  and  around  to  the  music  of  an 
enormous  band  high  above  them  among  the 
trees  in  the  center.  They  slept  at  an  inexpen 
sive  lodging  house  to  which  they  had  been 
taken  by  one  of  the  stokers. 

But  the  next  day  was  very  like  the  second 
day  at  Havana,  except  that  the  possibilities  of 
Vera  Cruz  seemed  to  be  fewer.  They  could 
not  walk  in  any  direction  without  soon  coming 
to  the  water  or  to  a  hot  and  dreary  stretch  of 
sand,  and  in  their  unconsciously  blase  New 
York  fashion  they  had  become,  by  the  second 
day,  hardened  to  ragged  Indians,  enormous 
straw  hats  and  scarlet  sarapcs.  They  sat  on 
a  shady  bench  in  the  Plaza  and  discussed  an 
immediate  return  to  New  York.  Lansing  was 
for  going  overland;  he  had  a  hazy  idea  that 
they  were  near  the  border,  and  he  was  amazed 
and  troubled  for  a  moment  when  the  stoker, 
whom  they  several  times  met  again,  laughed 
and  told  them  that  the  border  was  a  half  a 
week  away  in  a  train.  This,  of  course,  they 
52 


WANDERLUST 

knew  they  could  not  afford,  and  they  decided 
to  work  their  way  back,  as  they  had  come,  on 
a  steamer. 

After  that  they  spent  most  of  their  time  on 
the  docks,  or  in  front  of  the  hotels  and  cafes 
near  them,  waylaying  skippers  and  mates.  But 
places  on  ships  bound  for  New  York  were  ap 
parently  not  to  be  had  for  the  asking.  The 
men  to  whom  they  applied  were  invariably 
curt  and  definite  when  they  weren't,  as  some 
times  happened,  brutally  abusive.  This  was 
annoying  although  it  was  also,  now  and  then, 
amusing.  They,  as  yet,  had  not  begun  to  re 
gard  matters  in  the  light  of  a  "  situation,"  for 
they  still  had  a  little  money.  At  this  period 
of  their  ebbing  fortunes  it  seemed  to  them 
that  they  were  making  a  sort  of  humiliating 
concession  when  they  ceased  to  specify  New 
York  as  their  destination,  and  resolved  to  sail 
on  any  ship  bound  for  any  American  port.  But 
here,  again,  they  were  met  with  the  same  irri 
tated  outbursts,  or  brief,  cold  denials. 

They  did  not  know  it,  because  outside  of  the 
little  ruts  in  which  they  had  always  moved 

53 


PREJUDICES 

back  and  forth,  they  knew  nothing,  but  Mex 
ico,  in  winter,  is  one  of  the  great  goals  of  the 
American  tramp.  Thousands  of  them,  in  per 
petually  following  at  the  heels  of  summer,  drift 
across  the  border  and  gradually  wander  from 
Laredo  to  San  Luis  Potosi,  to  the  City  of 
Mexico,  to  Tampico  and  to  Vera  Cruz.  They 
approach  one  in  the  Plaza,  in  the  Alameda,  at 
the  doors  of  hotels  and  theaters  and  restaur 
ants,  and,  with  an  always  interesting  fiction, 
extract  twenty-five  cents  from  one  in  the  name 
of  patriotism.  When  the  spring  comes  and  it 
is  once  more  warm  at  home,  they  haunt  the 
seaports,  endeavoring  to  return  by  water.  For 
short-handed  ships  at  Vera  Cruz  in  April  and 
May  there  is  an  embarrassment  of  choice — a 
glut.  Without  in  the  least  suspecting  it,  Hay- 
ward  and  Lansing  had,  in  the  eyes  of  the 
world,  become  tramps,  seeking  a  return  pass 
age. 

The  heat  had  begun  to  be  intense  and  the 
invariable   refusal   of  their   services  was   dis 
couraging,  but  far  more  so  were  the  intermin 
able  mornings   and   afternoons   and   evenings 
54 


WANDERLUST 

when,  for  the  time  being,  they  gave  up  their 
quest  and  sat  on  a  bench  in  the  Plaza,  or,  at 
sunset,  strolled  down  to  the  breakwater  for  the 
redsnappers  and  the  evening  breeze.  They  had 
left  home  together  and  they  stayed  together 
as  a  matter  of  course,  for  they  did  not  know 
anyone  else,  but  they  no  longer  had  anything 
in  particular  to  say  to  each  other.  For  the 
most  part  they  were  silent  and  listless.  They 
spoke  only  when  something  occurred  to  them 
relevant  to  what,  at  last,  had  begun  to  strike 
them  as  their  "  situation." 

'  It'll  save  money  if  we  have  one  room  in 
stead  of  two,  and  sleep  in  the  same  bed,"  Hay- 
ward  declared  one  night,  after  a  day  in  which 
they  had  scarcely  spoken  at  all. 

"If  we  don't  get  up  so  early — What's  the 
use  anyhow  ? — We  won't  have  to  pay  for 
breakfast.  Two  meals  is  enough  if  you're 
asleep,"  suggested  Lansing  a  day  or  so  later. 
And  as  long  as  they  had  money  they  spent 
it  only  for  their  bed  and  their  two  daily  meals. 
Then  came  the  inevitable  day  when  they  no 
longer  had  money,  when  they  realized  that 
5  55 


PREJUDICES 

the  few  cents  they  were  spending  for  their 
supper  were  the  last.  It  was  disagreeahle  and 
they  had  begun  to  hate  Vera  Cruz — the  monot 
ony  of  it,  the  enforced  idleness,  the  blistering 
heat,  the  rumor  (they  heard  it  from  some  Eng 
lish  sailors  on  the  dock)  of  yellow  fever,  and. 
their  inability  to  leave  it  all  behind  them.  But 
although  they  were  alarmed  they  were  not 
yet  panic-stricken.  They  each  had  a  dress- 
suit  case,  an  extra  suit  of  clothes,  an  extra 
pair  of  shoes,  some  shirts  and  underclothes,  a 
hat  as  well  as  a  cap,  three  razors  and  a  cheap 
watch. 

The  watch  went  first.  They  didn't  need  a 
watch.  When  they  wished  to  know  the  time 
they  could  glance  up  from  their  bench  at  the 
clock  on  the  tower  of  the  "  municipal  palace." 
After  this  they  parted  on  two  successive  days 
with  the  dress-suit  cases,  then  the  hats,  the 
clothes  and  shoes  and  shirts  and  underclothes, 
one  by  one.  The  disposal  of  two  of  the  razors 
gave  them  for  forty-eight  hours  almost  a  sense 
of  opulence.  Lansing  did  not  know  there  was 
a  third  razor  and  Hayward  did  not  tell  him  of 

'56 


WANDERLUST 

it.  Hayward  was  an  innately  neat  person,  and 
at  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  to  which  he  belonged  in 
New  York,  he  had  grown  to  look  upon  free 
soap  and  unending  hot  and  cold  shower-baths 
in  a  light  that  was  spiritual  as  well  as  physical. 
He  was  good-looking  and  he  knew  it.  The 
thought  of  becoming  an  unshaven  thing  was 
abhorrent  to  him.  Starvation,  just  then,  he 
felt  he  could  face,  but  the  prospect  of  a  week's 
beard  revolted  him.  So  he  twisted  the  razor 
into  a  piece  of  newspaper  and  secreted  it  in 
his  pocket.  As  long  as  he  and  Lansing  were 
together  he  knew  he  would  not  be  able  to 
shave;  he  could  not  confess  to  the  possession 
of  anything  so  convertible  into  money  without 
immediately  converting  it.  But  the  sensation 
of  guilt  was  at  first  dispelled  by  an  anticipatory 
thrill  at  the  thought  of  the  day  when  he  could 
once  more  look  clean  and  fresh  and  pink  under 
his  sunburn.  He  did  not  work  it  out  in  words, 
but  the  razor  was  to  him  a  tangible  symbol  of 
self-respect,  and  he  clung  to  it,  although  it 
would  have  bought  them  both  the  food  they 
had  begun  to  need. 

57 


PREJUDICES 

"  We've  got  to  beat  it.  We've  got  to  beat 
it  right  away,"  he  said  one  morning,  when 
they  awoke  to  the  prospect  of  a  foodless  day. 
"  They  don't  want  us  on  the  ships,  but  they'll 
have  to  take  us  anyhow.  We'll  sneak  on  board 
and  hide.  After  they  get  started  they'll  have 
to  keep  us.  They  can't  throw  us  overboard, 
and  we'll  work.  Gee,  how  I  want  to  work!  " 

That  day  they  ate  nothing,  but  in  the  even 
ing  they  marvelously  succeeded  in  smuggling 
themselves  on  a  steamer  bound  for  New 
Orleans,  and  in  the  prospect  of  getting  away 
they  forgot  that  they  were  hungry.  One  of 
the  crew,  with  whom  they  struck  up  an  ac 
quaintance  on  the  dock,  seemed  impressed  by 
the  sincerity  with  which  they  swore  they 
would  pay  him  if  he  would  make  it  possible  for 
them  to  return  to  where  they  could  once  more 
work.  He  agreed  to  help  them  conditionally ; 
that  is,  he  would  get  them  on  board  and  stow 
them  away,  if  he  could  do  it  without  too  much 
risk  to  himself.  The  attendant  conditions  had 
to  be  just  right ;  sometimes  it  was  easy  enough 
and  sometimes  it  couldn't  be  done  at  all. 

58 


WANDERLUST 

In  their  case  the  right  conditions  were  un 
expectedly  furnished  in  the  fraction  of  a 
second  that  it  takes  a  cable  to  snap  and  drop 
a  large  piece  of  locomotive  from  the  main 
deck  on  a  dozen  barrels  of  apples  in  the  hold 
below.  In  the  uproar  that  followed  and  con 
tinued  for  five  or  six  minutes,  the  only  cool 
and  competent  person  was  the  new  friend  of 
Hayward  and  Lansing.  He  had  been  waiting 
for  something  of  the  kind  to  happen,  and  he 
took  instant  advantage  of  it.  While  everyone 
else  was  screaming  Spanish  oaths  and  peering 
into  the  hatchway  at  the  ruins,  he  hustled  the 
two  on  board  and  hid  them.  An  hour  and  a 
half  later,  Hayward,  dazed  and  suffocated,  was 
dragged  out  by  the  feet  and  kicked  down  the 
gang  plank.  Lansing  did  not  reappear.  From 
the  dock,  Hayward  watched  the  vessel  become 
first  a  black  speck  and  then  a  suggestion  of 
low-lying  smoke  in  the  dusk. 

He  was  all  at  once  horribly  alone  and  lonely, 

but  it  did  not  occur  to  him  to  feel  resentful. 

Lansing's  luck  had  been  good;  his  own  had 

been  bad.     That  was  all  there  was  to  it.     He 

59 


PREJUDICES 

was  glad  someone  had  been  lucky.  That  night 
he  went  back  to  the  lodging  house  and  slept 
in  the  bed — it  was  the  last  bed  he  ever  slept  in 
—and  as  he  had  no  money,  he  in  the  morning 
gave  the  patron  his  razor. 

Then  began  for  him  an  existence,  the  abso 
lute  hopelessness  of  which  appalled  and 
crushed  him.  At  first  a  ship  to  New  York 
had  seemed  to  him  the  only  solution  of  his 
predicament;  then  the  idea  of  a  ship  to  any 
where  had  become  a  vision  of  paradise;  now 
he  saw  that  ships  were  an  impossibility.  As 
the  season  advanced  the  officers  became  more 
and  more  vigilant.  A  shabby,  unshaven  young 
man  could  not  go  within  speaking  distance  of 
a  ship.  He  made  the  rounds  of  the  hotels  and 
asked  for  work — any  kind  of  work — but  there 
was  none.  He  tried  to  get  employment  as  a 
laborer  on  the  dock,  but  the  foreman,  who 
spoke  English,  laughed  and  asked  him  why  he 
wrished  to  commit  suicide. 

"  An  American  keeping  one  of  us  out  of  a 
job  would  be  stabbed  in  an  hour,"  he  declared, 
and  refused  to  hire  him.  He  managed  for  a 
60 


WANDERLUST 

time  to  keep  alive,  because  one  day  he  remem 
bered  that  on  the  little  finger  of  his  left  hand 
he  had  a  gold  ring.  For  years  it  had  been  so 
much  a  part  of  him  that  it  had  not  occurred  to 
him  to  sell  it.  The  discovery  of  it  came  as  a 
kind  of  revelation  and  made  it  possible  for  him 
to  eat,  sparingly,  for  two  days.  Then  a  brisk 
little  American  woman,  in  a  white  duck  suit, 
approached  him  in  the  Plaza  and  gave  him 
twenty-five  centavos  for  delivering  hand  bills. 
She  was  a  fortune  teller — a  "  seeress,"  and 
had  recently  opened  a  "  Studio  of  the  Occult  " 
in  the  Hotel  Seguranga,  across  the  way.  She 
seemed  like  a  kind,  capable  little  creature  and 
once,  when  he  had  not  eaten  for  two  days,  he 
went  to  the  hotel  and  asked  for  her ;  but  as  he 
was  unshaven  and  dazed  and  rather  vague, 
they  assumed  him  to  be  a  drunken  tramp  and 
drove  him  away.  Then  he  made  the  acquaint 
ance,  in  the  Plaza,  of  an  utterly  unreal  person 
of  no  particular  age,  who  dragged  out  of  the 
hotel  and  in  again  every  afternoon  for  half  an 
hour  or  so,  with  the  aid  of  a  cane.  His  face 
was  bloated  and  discolored,  but  his  body  was 
61 


PREJUDICES 

no  more  than  a  semi-upright  arrangement  of 
bones.  Hayward  at  first  thought  he  was  an 
invalid  in  the  last  stages,  then  felt  sure  he  was 
a  drunkard,  and,  finally,  it  came  to  him  that 
the  man  was  a  slave  to  some  drug.  He  would 
occasionally  give  Hayward  the  twenty-five 
centavos  on  which  he  could  exist  for  several 
days,  and  then,  after  a  long  silence  on  a  bench, 
petulantly  demand :  "  What  do  you  do  with  all 
the  money  I 'give  you?  The  day  before  yes 
terday  I  gave  you  three  hundred  dollars.  I'm 
afraid  you're  extravagant."  In  one  of  his 
more  lucid  intervals,  he  suggested  the  Ameri 
can  consul,  and  Hayward  went  to  the  con 
sulate. 

"  I  don't  want  to  beg,  I  want  to  work,"  he 
said  when  the  consul  wheeled  from  a  desk  and 
impatiently  eyed  him. 

"  Oh,  I  hear  that  twenty  times  a  day.  Get 
out  and  don't  come  back,"  exclaimed  the 
consul  wearily.  He  "  got  out  "  and  he  did  not 
go  back.  Something  in  the  man's  dumpy, 
coarse,  dirty-fingernailed  personality  told  him 
it  would  be  useless.  Then  he  tried  to  steal  a 
62 


WANDERLUST 

ride  on  a  freight  train  bound  for  the  City  of 
Mexico,  and  was  discovered  and  thrown  out 
at  the  second  station,  twelve  miles  away.  It 
merely  meant  his  walking  back  to  Vera  Cruz 
in  the  blistering  heat  over  the  endless  sand 
dunes  and  past  the  fever-stricken  marshes 
where  the  mosquitoes  devoured  him.  He 
spent  as  much  as  he  dared  of  that  night  on  a 
bench  in  the  Plaza,  but  for  fear  the  policemen 
might  begin  to  think  he  was  sitting  too  long 
in  one  place,  he,  from  time  to  time,  aroused 
himself  and  walked  down  to  the  docks,  or  to 
the  two  railway  stations  at  opposite  ends  of 
the  town.  The  humiliation  of  it  was  worse, 
somehow,  than  his  hunger  and  his  fatigue. 
The  next  night,  however,  the  need  of  sleep 
was  overpowering,  and  he  lay  down  on  the 
beach  at  the  edge  of  the  town.  In  spite  of  the 
ants  that  swarmed  up  under  his  clothes  and 
stung  him  from  his  neck  to  his  ankles,  he  slept 
the  sleep  of  exhaustion.  But  to  sleep  on  the 
beach  at  Vera  Cruz  is  against  the  law,  and  at 
three  o'clock  in  the  morning  he  was  arrested 
and  thrown  into  a  vile  and  crowded  room 

63 


PREJUDICES 

under  the  tower,  whose  clock  of  late  had  struck 
for  him  so  many  aimless,  hopeless  hours.  In 
the  morning  the  judge  dismissed  him  with  the 
reminder  (a  negro  from  Havana  translated 
the  ultimatum)  that  a  second  offense  would 
mean  thirty  days. 

Then  followed  a  horrible  week — a  last 
nightmare.  He  heard  from  a  trainman  that 
there  was  work  at  the  machine  shops  of  Casa 
Blanca,  forty  miles  away,  and,  in  the  incred 
ible  heat,  he  walked  there,  and  when  he  found 
the  rumor  was  untrue,  he  walked  back  again. 
On  the  way,  he  lived  on  poisonous  water  and 
a  yellow  nut  that  looked  like  dates  and  grew 
on  scrubby  palm  trees  by  the  roadside.  He 
did  not  know  how  long  it  had  taken  him  to 
make  the  journey.  When  he  once  more 
reached  the  inevitable  Plaza,  he  was  dizzy  with 
hunger,  and  as  he  thought  he  was  going  to 
die,  he  reeled  over  to  where  the  world  was 
dining  under  the  arcade  on  the  sidewalk. 
There  were  fifteen  or  twenty  tables,  and  after 
passing  them  all  he  picked  out  one  where  five 
Americans,  three  men  and  two  women,  had 


WANDERLUST 

finished  eating  and  were  lolling  back  in  their 
chairs,  waiting  for  their  plates  of  half-con 
sumed  meat  to  be  removed. 

"  I'm  not  a  beggar,"  he  began  hurriedly, 
taking  off  his  hat.  "  I'm  not  asking  you  for 
money,  but  I  haven't  had  anything  to  eat  to 
day.  Please  let  me  have  some  of  what  you've 
left  before  the  waiter  takes  it  away."  They 
might  have  given  it  to  him,  and  then  again 
they  might  not  have.  He  never  knew.  The 
waiter  came  back  just  then  and  authoritatively 
slapped  him  away  with  a  soiled  napkin. 

"  What  pretty  hair  he  had,"  one  of  the 
women  reflected.  "  It  grows  back  from  his 
forehead  in  a  kind  of  proud  way.  Of  course 
he's  a  fake." 

"  I  didn't  notice  his  hair,  but  he  had  perfect 
teeth,"  said  the  other.  "  This  country's  just 
full  of  tramps." 

Late  that  night,  when  a  young  man  skeptic 
ally  gave  him  a  Mexican  dollar  he  wished  to 
get  rid  of,  as  he  was  sailing  for  New  York  in 
the  morning,  Hayward  suddenly  burst  into 
tears  and,  with  his  head  on  the  back  of  the 

65 


PREJUDICES 

bench,  sobbed  for  half  an  hour.  He  lived  on 
the  dollar  for  five  days.  In  the  meantime,  the 
drug  fiend  died,  and  the  seeress  departed  for 
the  City  of  Mexico. 

Hayward  had  never  read  "  Les  Miserables," 
but  on  the  sixth  day  after  the  young  man  had 
given  him  the  dollar,  he  remembered  that 
on  one  of  his  teeth  was  a  gold  crown,  and, 
without  success,  he  asked  a  dentist  to  pull  and 
buy  it.  He  had  nothing  to  eat  that  day,  and 
at  night  the  desire  to  lie  down  and  sleep  in 
stead  of  hypocritically  walking  about  as  if  he 
were  going  somewhere  became  irresistible.  So 
he  went  again  to  the  beach  and  lay  down 
among  the  ants,  and  in  the  morning  a  police 
man  scared  away  the  buzzards  that  had  al 
ready  begun  to  hop  about  him  and  crane  their 
hideously  naked  necks.  The  American  consul, 
greatly  bored  (the  heat  was  frightful),  offi 
cially  glanced  at  him  and  then  they  dumped 
him  into  a  hole  with  an  Indian  who  had  been 
stabbed  in  a  drunken  row  the  night  before. 


TRAVEL 


TRAVEL 

A  LITTLE  old  man  came  into  the 
steamship  office  where  I  was  buying 
a  ticket.  He  had  mild,  kindly  eyes, 
pink  cheeks,  a  vague,  white  beard  and  a  defer 
ential,  rather  apologetic  manner. 

"  Have  you  any  new  literature  to-day?  "  he 
inquired  of  the  clerk  after  some  hesitation. 

"  Sure,"  the  clerk  answered  genially,  and 
picked  him  out  a  bundle  of  those  prettily  and 
skilfully  illustrated  pamphlets  describing  al 
most  every  known  country  on  the  globe.  He 
also  gave  him  plans  of  ships,  price  lists  of  the 
various  staterooms  and  dates  of  sailing. 

"  He  must  be  something  of  a  traveler,"  I 
suggested  when  the  old  man,  after  many 
thanks,  left  the  office. 

The  clerk  smiled. 

'*  The  old  guy  and  his  wife  have  been  al- 


PREJUDICES 

most  everywhere,"  he  answered ;  "  but  I  don't 
think  that  either  of  them  has  ever  been  out  of 
this  town,"  he  enigmatically  added,  "  and 
they're  both  about  a  hundred  and  fifty." 

"Yes?"   I   said  encouragingly. 

"  He  comes  in  regularly  twice  a  year,"  the 
clerk  went  on,  "  and  gets  all  the  '  literature,' 
as  he  calls  it,  about  the  summer  and  winter 
tours.  Then  he  and  his  wife  take  the  trips  by 
what  I  call  the  Easy  Chair  Route.  They  not 
only  know  all  about  the  railway  trains  and 
ships  and  stagecoaches,  they  study  up  the 
places,  as  they  go  along,  out  of  books  they  get 
from  the  public  library.  I  bet  they  know  a 
darned  sight  more  about  Europe,  Arope,  I  rope 
and  Sirope  than  most  of  the  people  who've 
been  there." 

The  clerk's  remarks  called  up  for  me  a 
charming  picture.  The  old  couple  would  de 
cide  on  Egypt  and  the  Holy  Land  for  their 
winter  cruise,  and  in  the  long,  cold,  winter 
evenings,  seated  at  a  table  near,  not  a  fireplace 
(I  saw  at  a  glance  that  their  little  parlor  would 
not  contain  a  fireplace)  but  one  of  those  high, 
70 


TRAVEL 

shining  and  most  comfortable  stoves  with 
countless  little  isinglass  windows  and  a  sooth 
ing  red  glow  behind  them,  they  would  read 
aloud,  consult  maps  and  pictures  and  time 
tables  and  no  doubt  disagree  very  gently  here 
and  there  as  to  the  proper  interpretation  of 
certain  passages  in  the  Scriptures.  And  until 
the  hour  arrived  for  "  locking  up,"  for  re 
filling  the  stove,  for  seeing  that  the  cat  was 
comfortable  for  the  night  and  for  going  to 
bed,  they  would  actually  be  in  Egypt  or  the 
Holy  Land — much  more  so,  as  the  clerk  had 
shrewdly  appreciated,  than  many  of  the  so- 
journers  at  Shepheard's  Hotel,  or  the  renters 
of  steam  dahabeahs  on  the  Nile. 

It  undoubtedly  is  one  way  of  traveling,  and 
by  no  means  a  bad  way.  In  fact  I  once  came 
across  a  little  paper  in  the  Contributor's  Club 
of  the  Atlantic  Monthly  declaring  it  to  be  the 
best  way.  But  then  I  am  convinced  that  all 
the  contributions  to  the  Contributor's  Club  of 
the  Atlantic  Monthly  are  contributed  by  very 
cultivated  and  cozy,  home-loving  old  maids. 
Books  of  travel  and  portfolios  of  well-taken 
6  71 


PREJUDICES 

photographs  are  the  rails  upon  which  the 
easy  chair  glides,  the  unknown  sea  upon 
which  it  so  placidly  sails.  Everyone  has 
made  voyages  of  this  kind  and,  while  many 
of  them  are  uneventful,  some  of  them  are 
thrilling. 

The  most  memorable  one  (not  counting 
books  of  adventure  which  in  this  connection 
don't  count  at  all)  I  ever  took  was  long  ago 
to  the  Island  of  Barbados.  We  were  in  col 
lege  at  the  time  and  one  of  the  requirements 
of  the  advanced  English  course  we  were  study 
ing  was  that  everybody  should  write  a  story 
in  seven  chapters — plot,  locality  and  treatment 
being  left  to  our  own  discretion.  The  scene 
of  my  narrative  (it  makes  me  blush  when  I 
recall  that  little  masterpiece  of  fiction)  was 
in  and  about  Boston,  and  one  bitterly  cold 
sleeting  afternoon  I  asked  a  friend  of  mine 
what  he  was  going  to  write  about.  We  were 
in  his  study  at  the  time  and,  as  he  was  ab 
sorbed  at  his  desk  in  working  out  an  archi 
tectural  problem,  he  merely  muttered,  with  his 
nose  wrinkled  up,  "  Barbados." 
72 


TRAVEL 

"What  are  they?"  I  inquired. 

"  It  isn't  they,  it's  it,"  he  replied;  "it's  an 
island." 

"Where  is  it?"  I  asked. 

"  I  really  don't  know,"  he  said. 

"  But  how  can  you  write  about  it  if  you 
don't  know  anything  about  it?  "  I  pursued. 

"  Why,  doesn't  the  mere  name  convey  every 
thing  to  you?"  he  demanded. 

"  It  conveys,"  I  told  him,  "  some  sort  of 
vegetable.  Do  help  yourself  to  some  more  of 
the  barbados,"  I  added. 

'  To  me  it  means — but  let's  go  over  to  the 
library  and  get  a  book  about  it.  I've  meant 
to  all  along,  just  to  see  if  my  idea  of  it  was 
right,"  he  suggested.  So  we  went  to  Gore 
Hall,  where  the  man  at  the  desk  found  us  a 
book,  and  that  evening,  in  front  of  a  grate 
full  of  hot,  red  coal,  we  went  to  the  Island  of 
Barbados,  drinking  beer  and  eating  crackers 
on  the  way,  and  also  during  our  residence  on 
the  exquisite  little  island  where  "  the  sea  as 
sumes  strange  and  unexpected  tints ;  it  may  be 
violet,  with  streaks  of  lettuce  green  or  forget- 

73 


PREJUDICES 

me-not  blue,  or  may  show  a  stretch  of  brilliant 
luster  such  as  shines  on  a  beetle's  back,  or  may 
shimmer  into  a  lake  of  lapis  lazuli."  We 
stayed  on  the  Island  of  Barbados  until  half- 
past  two  in  the  morning.  Just  recently  I  re 
turned  there  one  evening  in  a  better  book,  and 
if  anyone  wishes  this  winter  to  take  a  cruise  to 
the  West  Indies  without  leaving  home,  I  rec 
ommend  him  to  take  passage  at  once  on  Sir 
Frederick  Treve's  recently  published  "  The 
Cradle  of  the  Deep,"  one  of  the  most  entranc 
ing  and  beautifully  written  books  of  travel  of 
my  acquaintance. 

As  for  actual  traveling,  the  kind  that  neces 
sitates  physical  as  \vell  as  mental  activity,  one 
great  truth  about  it  has  at  last  dawned  upon 
me.  No  matter  what  may  be  your  method  of 
procedure,  no  matter  whether  your  means  be 
modest  or  unlimited  (here,  I  confess,  I  am 
drawing  on  my  imagination),  it  is  always 
much  more  comfortable  to  stay  at  home.  This 
may  sound  like  an  undue  emphasis  upon  an 
obvious  fact,  but  judging  from  the  number  of 
persons  one  everywhere  meets  who  do  not 
74 


TRAVEL 

seem  to  have  grusped  the  fact,  I  don't  believe 
it  is.  All  over  the  world,  travelers  for  pleas 
ure  continually  complain  of  the  hotels,  the 
food,  the  trains,  boats,  servants,  prices,  man 
ners,  customs  and  weather.  Almost  the  entire 
conversation  of  a  group  of  fellow  countrymen 
I  once  met  on  a  steamer  consisted  of  enumer 
ating  the  things  they  were  going  to  eat  when 
they  arrived  in  New  York.  Just  recently  a 
friend  of  mine,  who  had  made  a  short  trip  in 
Mexico,  referred  with  bitterness  to  that  rather 
primitive  country  because  a  bath  necessitated 
going  out  of  his  hotel  to  a  bathing  establish 
ment.  Nothing  he  saw  in  Mexico  apparently 
in  any  way  compensated  him  for  this  and 
various  other  minor  discomforts.  Without 
doubt,  "  be  it  ever  so  humble,"  there  is  no 
place  like  it,  and  I  have  often  wondered,  this 
being  the  case,  just  why  we  usually  do  take 
a  trip  whenever  the  opportunity  offers  it 
self.  What  is  the  psychology  of  the  desire 
to  travel? 

With  me,  at   least,   I   think   it  arises  from 
the  same  impulse  that  prompts  one  to  get  up 

75 


PREJUDICES 

and  take  a  walk  after  one  has  sat  too  long  in 
the  house.  The  desire  to  travel  is  a  kind  of 
desire  to  stretch  the  mental  legs.  There  is  no 
essential  difference  of  intent  between  the  little 
journey  "  down  town "  and  back,  and  a 
journey  to  Italy  or  India.  During  a  pleasant, 
objectless  stroll  on  Main  street  my  mind  is 
in  much  the  same  state,  although  perhaps  in 
a  lesser  degree,  that  it  is  in  when  I, 

With  observation  and  extensive  view, 
Survey  the  world  from  China  to  Peru. 

Sometimes  the  idea  of  one's  entire  country 
becomes  even  as  a  long  occupied  chair  in  a 
room,  and  it  is  then  that,  circumstances  being 
propitious,  people  pack  up  and  flit  to  lands 
where  everything  is  different.  Having  volun 
tarily  sought  complete  change,  it  always  strikes 
me  as  ungrateful  and  childish  to  quarrel  with 
it  when  they  get  it.  If  almost  everything  in 
a  foreign  land  were  not  different,  travel  would 
begin  and  end  with  locomotion,  and  locomo 
tion  is  the  least  of  travel. 

What  the  most  of  it  is,  I  have  never  been 


TRAVEL 

able  quite  to  determine.  No  doubt  to  each 
person,  or  rather  to  every  group  of  persons 
who  can  be  classified  under  the  same  general 
head,  it  is  something  different.  One  old 
gentlemen  I  knew  went  through  Italy  and 
Greece  all  but  oblivious  to  the  scenery,  the 
aspect  of  the  cities,  the  costume,  the  various 
sounds  and  the  atmospheres  that  made  one 
country  Italian  and  the  other  Greek,  but  he 
had  a  thrilling  time.  His  delight  was  to  read 
and  translate  every  inscription  he  came  across 
on  a  monument.  He  could  have  found  them 
all  in  archaeological  works  at  the  public  li 
brary  at  home,  and  done  the  same  thing.  The 
intense  pleasure,  however,  lay  in  doing  it  pn 
the  ground  from  the  original  stones.  I  do  not 
for  a  moment  doubt  that  the  thirty-six  young 
ladies,  who  recently  won  a  newspaper  "  popu 
larity  contest  "  and  toured  the  continent  with 
a  steamer  trunk  full  of  assorted  chewing  gum, 
enjoyed  Italy  quite  as  much  as  did  my  old 
friend.  Some  people  I  know  enjoy  foreign 
travel  almost  solely  because  of  the  acquaint 
ances  they  pick  up.  Venice  spells  Smith,  Si- 

77 


PREJUDICES 

enna  really  means  Jones;  Chartres,  Amiens 
and  Beauvais  are  a  confused  but  pleasant 
memory  of  the  Robinsons,  all  of  which  is  a 
perfectly  legitimate  manner  of  finding  pleas 
ure  in  travel. 

Some  persons  enjoy  traveling  in  solitude ; 
the  presence  of  a  companion  disturbs  their 
susceptibility  to  receiving  valuable  "  impres 
sions."  Others  enjoy  it  intensely  but  would 
be  wretched  unless  they  were  accompanied  by 
some  one  capable  of  supplying  them  with  the 
impressions  they  long  to  have  but  don't  know 
how.  Many  regard  travel  entirely  from  an 
educational  angle.  They  have  a  tendency  to 
translate  everything  they  see  into  terms  of 
dates.  It  pleases  them  to  learn,  for  instance, 
that  Lucca  Delia  Robbia  was  born  in  1400, 
and  that  "  while  Botticelli  was  one  of  the 
worst  anatomists  he  was  one  of  the  greatest 
draughtsmen  of  the  Renaissance,"  but  they 
worry  a  good  deal  for  fear  they'll  forget  it. 
In  the  meanwhile  they  rather  lose  sight  of 
Delia  Robbia's  "  sweet,  ethereal  and  visionary 
grace,"  as  well  as  Botticelli's  anatomy  and 

78 


TRAVEL 

draughtsmanship;  but  it's  a  comfort  to  know 
that  they  know  they're  there.  Still  others 
travel  in  a  pleasantly  aimless  fashion,  quietl/ 
reveling  in  their  lack  of  obligation  to  see  or 
to  do  anything  they  do  not  wish  to.  One 
man  I  know,  who  belongs  to  this  type,  has  a 
genuine  love  of  art  and  considerable  knowl 
edge  of  it ;  but  although  he  has  been  in  London 
several  times  he  has  never  seen  either  the  Na 
tional  Gallery  or  the  Elgin  marbles.  When  I 
asked  him  why  not,  he  said  in  all  sincerity  that 
when  he  was  in  London  he  had  never  been  in 
the  kind  of  mood  that  made  it  a  pleasure  to 
look  at  such  things,  and  he  hated  to  make  a 
duty  of  what  often  was  so  great  a  pleasure. 
The  pleasure  of  travel,  in  a  word,  depends  en 
tirely  upon  the  point  of  view.  Like  all  the 
other  pleasures  of  life  it  depends,  to  employ 
the  trite,  true  phrase,  upon  what  we  ourselves 
bring  to  it. 

I  may  be  wrong,  but  it  often  seems  to  me 

that  English  people  of  a  certain  kind  are  the 

best,   the   ideal,   travelers.      We  all   know,   of 

course,  that  the  continent  of  Europe  is  infested 

79 


PREJUDICES 

with  the  most  odious  English  tourists,  who 
cross  the  channel  for  a  stay  of  a  week  or  two 
*and  who  spend  most  of  their  time  in  disputing 
hotel  bills,  in  trying  to  get  something  for 
nothing  and  in  despising  the  various  countries 
they  visit  because  they  happen  to  differ  in 
many  respects  from  the  British  Isles.  One 
hears  much  of  "  vulgar  Americans,"  and  one 
often  sees  them;  but  in  my  tolerably  wide  ex 
perience  none  of  God's  creatures  masquerad 
ing  as  human  beings  has  ever  filled  me  with 
the  same  horror  that  I  have  in  the  presence  of 
this  type  of  coarse,  brutal,  dense,  provincial 
touring  English  person — man  or  woman.  In 
America  we  simply  have  never  invented  such 
an  awful  type;  it  is  inconceivable  to  us  until 
we  meet  it  in  the  form  of  certain  English 
people  on  the  Continent. 

These,  naturally,  are  not  the  kind  of  Eng 
lish  to  whom  I  refer:  the  kind  who  I  always 
feel  are  the  ideal  travelers.  As  travelers  they 
are  ideal,  because  they  are  (for  want  of  a  bet 
ter  term)  so  "well  rounded."  They  bring 
to  their  travels  in  foreign  lands  so  much — a 
80 


TRAVEL 

quiet  enthusiasm,  cultivated  tastes,  thorough 
ness  ;  a  mental  and  physical  vitality  that  among 
Americans  is  very  rare.  Unlike  the  Ameri 
can  schoolma'am,  they  never  specialize  on 
dates  and  art  criticism;  they  usually  know  the 
dates  beforehand,  and  are  capable  of  discrim 
inating  between  the  good  and  trashy.  They 
enjoy  making  agreeable  acquaintances,  but  ac 
quaintances  are  not  the  sole  object  of  their 
travels.  They  don't  like  to  miss  anything, 
and,  although  they  are  never  in  a  hurry, 
nothing  escapes  them.  While  an  American 
family  is  taking  an  exhausted  nap  or  hanging 
about  a  hotel  wondering  what  to  do,  these 
English  people  will  be  tramping  five  miles  to 
see  the  sunset  and  get  up  an  appetite  for 
dinner..  There  is  something  admirably  com 
plete  about  them.  They  enjoy  the  churches 
and  galleries  and  appreciate  them,  but  they  are 
also  sincerely  interested  in  the  life  of  the 
people  and  in  nature.  The  incidents  of  travel 
they  take  calmly  as  they  come,  and  when  they 
complain  it  is  only  because  their  rights  have 
been  infringed  upon.  Out  of  traveling  they 
81 


PREJUDICES 

get,  it  always  strikes  me,  everything  there  is 
to  get. 

That  they  do,  I  have  begun  to  believe,  is 
simply  because  of  what  they  bring  to  their 
travels.  They  bring  (to  repeat)  quiet  but  un 
flagging  enthusiasm,  considerable  cultivation, 
the  habit  of  thoroughness  in  anything  they  un 
dertake,  excellent  digestions  and  equable  tem 
pers.  All  of  which  lands  us  bump  up  against 
the  inevitable  platitude  that  invariably  stands 
guard  at  the  other  end  of  almost  every  train 
of  thought.  Abstractly  considered,  travel  is 
at  best  an  uncomfortable  activity  more  often 
than  not :  strange  beds,  strange  food,  a  con 
stant,  hideous  packing  and  unpacking  of 
trunks  too  small  to  contain  conveniently  one's 
few  possessions;  long,  dreary  intervals  in  rail 
way  stations,  nightmare  scrambles  at  custom 
houses,  steamers  that  bury  their  noses  in  the 
sea  and  kick  their  heels  in  the  air,  sleeping  cars 
always  either  too  hot  or  too  cold.  Such  is 
travel  in  the  abstract.  Its  pleasant  qualities, 
like  the  pleasant  qualities  of  almost  every  other 
pleasure  in  life,  must  be  supplied  largely  by 
82 


TRAVEL 

ourselves.  If  travel  did  nothing  else  for  us, 
it  would  be  valuable  by  reason  of  its  ability  to 
drive  home  this  old  truth.  In  order  thor 
oughly  to  enjoy  travel  we  must  be  able  to  give 
considerably  more  than  we  get. 


FELLOW   PASSENGERS 


FELLOW    PASSENGERS 

THE  great  German  steamship  com 
panies  have  developed,  one  might  al 
most  say  created,  a  new  type  of  Am 
erican.  This  dawned  on  me  last  winter  while 
taking  a  three  months'  cruise  to  South  Amer 
ica  and  back.  The  type  is  that  of  the  re 
tired  business  man  who  is  enjoying  his  retire 
ment.  There  was  a  time,  not  so  long  ago  in 
our  history,  when  he  scarcely  existed,  for  the 
simple  reason  that  he  never,  or  at  least  rarely, 
retired.  Idleness  spelled  boredom.  If  in  a 
misguided  moment  mother  and  the  girls  per 
suaded  him  to  give  up  business  he  found  him 
self  confronted  by  an  appalling  amount  of 
leisure  rather  impossible  for  him  to  manipu 
late  and  make  use  of. 

The  Germans  in  their  wonderful  way  have 
changed  all  that.     Now  when  a  middle-aged 
7  87 


PREJUDICES 

man  has  made  enough  money  to  live  on  com 
fortably  they  offer  him  something  very  definite 
and  delightful  to  do.  He  can  at  any  season 
of  the  year  embark  on  a  "  floating  hotel  "  and 
go  to  some  far-away  and  interesting  part  of 
the  world  with  little  or  no  bother  to  himself. 
Just  this  I  notice  is  what  in  large  numbers  he 
has  of  late  years  begun  to  take  advantage  of. 
He  and  a  placid,  pleasant  wife  visit  the  Medi 
terranean  ports  during  the  winter,  investigate 
the  Scandinavian  countries,  including  the 
North  Cape,  during  the  summer,  encircle  the 
globe  during  the  greater  part  of  a  year,  and 
finally  decide  to  go  to  South  America.  Every 
thing  is  made  so  easy  for  him.  He  lives  on 
the  ship  during  the  entire  voyage  except,  per 
haps,  for  a  day  or  so  here  and  there  when,  for 
a  change,  the  party  stays  on  shore  at  a  hotel. 
The  necessity  of  constantly  ordering  food  or 
struggling  with  cabmen,  waiters  and  shop 
keepers  in  a  foreign  language  he  feels  himself 
too  old  to  learn  is  agreeably  eliminated  for 
him.  He  comes  home  with  new  interests,  a 
widened  horizon,  refreshed  in  mind  and  body 
88 


FELLOW    PASSENGERS 

and  usually  ready  to  start  out  again  the  next 
year. 

There  were  many  of  them  on  the  first  South 
American  cruise  of  last  winter,  and  to  me  the 
type  was  a  novel  one.  For  one  usually,  in  a 
vague  sort  of  a  way,  thinks  of  middle-aged 
Americans  traveling  in  strange  countries  for 
the  first  time  as  somewhat  helpless,  often 
bored,  often  irritated,  uncertain  as  to  where  to 
go  and  looking  forward  with  relief  to  the  date 
of  sailing  homeward.  Those  I  met  last  winter 
were  anything  but  that.  In  a  quiet,  restful 
sort  of  a  way  they  seemed  to  be  thoroughly 
enjoying  themselves.  Their  attitude  toward 
it  all  was  one  of  persons  who  had  placed 
themselves  in  the  hands  of  what  literally  was 
their  creator. 

It  was  interesting  for  the  first  few  days  to 
stretch  out  on  a  chair  in  the  sun  and,  with 
complete  detachment,  examine  one's  fellow 
passengers  as  they  passed  by.  One  always 
hears  that  "  a  ship  is  such  a  good  place  in 
which  to  study  human  nature."  Of  course  it 
is.  Every  place  is  if  one  has  the  eyes  and 


PREJUDICES 

ears  with  which  to  see  and  hear  it.  But  I 
do  not  believe  a  ship  is  particularly  so  any 
more.  The  day  for  that  has  passed.  People 
at,  the  present  time  travel  too  much  to  desire 
to  become  deeply  intimate  on  short  acquaint 
ance.  They  are  too  reserved,  too  experienced. 
Lifelong  friendships,  I  am  inclined  to  believe, 
are  not  often  made  any  more  on  ocean 
steamers. 

There  were  one  hundred  and  eighty-one 
persons  in  the  party,  and  as  they  strolled  about 
the  deck  I  discovered  myself  lazily  picking  out 
those  I  should  like,  those  I  "  shouldn't  mind," 
those  that,  through  their  sheer  lack  of  person 
ality,  I  should  never  even  see  again,  and  those 
I  should  run  from.  In  only  a  few  instances 
did  I  make  mistakes.  One  was  a  bouncing 
girl  with  a  voice  like  a  symphony  of  peacocks ; 
she  turned  out  to  be  agreeable  and  clever  in 
spite  of  it.  Another  was  a  German  who 
looked  like  an  overfed  dachshund  and  sat  op 
posite  me  at  table ;  another  was  an  old  gentle 
man  who  slopped  around  in  carpet  slippers 
(yes,  carpet  slippers  really  do  still  exist).  An- 
90 


FELLOW    PASSENGERS 

other  was — but  why  enumerate?  Finding  out 
who  they  all  were  was  the  next  step. 

There  was  the  famous  physician;  the  very 
grand  old  dame  who  held  herself  much  aloof 
because,  before  her  marriage,  she  had  been 
one  of  the  Orioles  of  Baltimore ;  the  lady  who 
cleared  about  two  hundred  thousand  dollars  a 
year  from  the  sales  of  a  patent  fly-paper — or 
was  it  a  patent  flea-powder  ?  I  forget — an  in 
vention  of  her  late  uncle's ;  the  young  man  who 
was  being  sent  on  the  trip  because  he  drank 
(he^certainly  did  drink;  he  was  drunk  for  six 
teen  thousand  sea-miles)  ;  the  "  mysterious 
pair  "  who  concealed  their  secret  to  the  end ; 
the  woman  who  had  written  a  book;  the 
melancholy  man  whose  wife  had  just  eloped  in 
New  York  with  the  chauffeur;  and  then  the 
numerous  nice,  quiet,  well-mannered  persons 
who,  like  happy  nations,  seemed  to  have  no 
histories  in  particular. 

By  the  time  we  had  reached  the  Island  of 
St.  Thomas  they  had  all  begun  to  find  them 
selves  as  well  as  one  another.  It  was  evident 
that,  unconsciously,  little  groups  were  form- 

91 


PREJUDICES 

ing;  that  certain  people  would  ask  to  be  put  in 
the  same  carriage  with  certain  others;  and   I 
think  a  native  drink  called  a  "  rum  swizzle," 
of  which  almost  everybody,  "  just  to  see  what 
it  was  like,"  partook  during  the  day,  did  not 
in  any  way  retard  the  growing  acquaintance 
ships.   By  the  time  we  arrived  at  Bahia,  our 
first  stopping-place  in  Brazil,  the  little  groups 
had  more  or  less  assumed  their  final  form.  It 
was  a  beautiful  example  of  birds  of  a  feather 
doing  just  what  we  have  always  been  told  they 
do.  The  young  girls  came  together,  one  could 
clearly  see,  chiefly  because  they  all  seemed  to 
be  engaged  in  the  manufacture  of  silk  neckties; 
four  or  five  middle-aged  ladies  found  the  knit 
ting  of  fluffy  white  shawls  a  convenient  and 
congenial   ice-pick;   similarity  of  business  in 
terests,  past  or  present,  was  of  course  instru 
mental  among  many  of  the  men.     Books,  and 
there  was  on  board  an  inexhaustible  supply  of 
them,  were  a  tremendous  factor  in  the  cement 
ing  of  friendly  relations.     By  merely  glancing 
at  a  book  some  one  seemed  to  be  enjoying  you 
usually  could  tell  whether  or  not  you  could 
92 


FELLOW    PASSENGERS 

have  anything  in  common.  Anybody  perusing 
one  of  your  favorite  volumes  offered  an  excuse 
for  stopping  and  chatting.  The  insatiable 
players  of  bridge  were,  from  the  first,  so  many 
magnets  and  poles. 

Not  among  the  least  important  of  the 
passengers  were  Elizabeth  and  Peter,  the  ship's 
cats.  Peter,  to  the  sorrow  of  the  officers  who 
adored  him,  apparently  found  friends  on  the 
dock  at  Buenos  Aires  and  disembarked,  but 
Elizabeth,  for  family  reasons,  remained  with 
us.  She  distinguished  herself  in  various  ways 
and  on  various  occasions,  three  of  them  being 
really  notable.  One  night  at  about  two  in  the 
morning  (always  a  somewhat  Hibernian 
method  of  expression)  she  entered  in  the  dark 
the  deck  stateroom  of  an  excitable  man  of 
fifty.  A  steward  sent  to  find  her  also  entered 
and,  in  his  search,  crawled  half  way  under  the 
bed.  The  excitable  man  of  fifty  hearing,  or 
perhaps  feeling,  some  one  under  his  bed  and 
fearing  thieves,  leaped  to  the  floor,  dragged 
the  steward  out  and  heroically  struggled  with 
him.  As  the  steward  spoke  no  English  and 

93 


PREJUDICES 

the  man  no  German,  this  duel  in  the  dark  con 
tinued  until  the  strangulated  cries  of  the 
former  and  the  appeals  for  help  of  the  latter 
brought  pretty  much  every  one  on  that  deck  to 
the  scene  and  made  it  possible  to  throw  some 
light,  electric  light,  on  it.  In  the  meanwhile 
Elizabeth  had  strolled  away  to  the  cabin  of  a 
lady  from  Argentina,  where  she  proceeded  to 
have  five  kittens.  Then  at  Pernambuco  fifty- 
six  of  the  passengers  rushed  ashore  and  re 
turned,  each  with  a  large  green  parrot.  Of 
course  most  of  them  got  loose  in  a  few  days 
but  were  allowed  to  go  pigeon-toeing  all  over 
the  deck  until  it  was  discovered  that  Elizabeth 
had  quietly  chewed  the  heads  off  three. 

In  addition  to  the  parrots  and  hundreds  of 
other  tropical  birds,  the  monkeys,  the  mar 
mosets  and  the  leopards  that  the  passengers 
in  afterwards  to  be  regretted  moments  of  en 
thusiasm  acquired,  the  super-alimentated  Ger 
man  indulged  himself  to  the  extent  of  a  boa 
constrictor.  The  first  time  he  went  down  to 
feed  it,  the  playful  little  creature  wound  it 
self  about  his  waist  in  several  coils  and  was 
94 


FELLOW    PASSENGERS 

beginning  to  constrict  in  the  most  successful 
fashion,  when  the  man's  shrieks  brought  four 
sailors  to  the  rescue.  It  took  the  strength  of 
all  of  them  to  untie  the  knot,  so  to  speak, 
and  had  the  reptile  been  able  to  find  anything 
around  which  to  twist  its  tail  there  would  have 
been  for  the  rest  of  the  voyage  a  vacant  seat 
opposite  me  at  table.  Oh,  yes,  we  had  some 
very  agreeable  fellow  passengers. 

It  was  the  parrots,  I  think,  that  first  caused 
dissension  among  them.  To  get  loose  was  to 
get  mixed,  and  it  was  a  wise  owner  who  knew 
his  own  bird,  although,  unfortunately  for  the 
ship's  peace,  many  thought  they  did.  There 
were  claims  and  counterclaims. 

"  My  parrot  had  a  tail,"  exclaimed  one 
woman  with  angry,  flashing  eyes  to  another. 

"  This  beastly  thing  has  just  bitten  my 
thumb,"  declared  a  second;  "my  own  bird 
never  bites.  They  have  made  a  mistake  and 
I  shall  complain  about  it  to  the  company." 
Still  another  aggrieved  one,  who  had  views 
different  from  those  of  the  committee  chosen 
to  draw  up  certain  resolutions,  let  it  be  known 

95 


PREJUDICES . 

that  if  they  did  not  end  by  regarding  the  mat 
ter  from  her  point  of  view  she  would  write 
to  the  company  saying  that  the  ship  was  dirty 
and  that  the  officers  had  been  drinking  heavily 
from  beginning  to  end,  which  was  not  only 
absolutely  false  but  had  no  relation  to  the 
matter  in  question.  It  was  all  very  absurd  but 
it  also  meant  that,  toward  the  end  of  three 
months  on  one  ship,  nerves  will  be  nerves. 
There  were  a  good  many  "  coolnesses  "  toward 
the  last,  and  in  the  smoking  room  some  angry 
and  bitter  words,  but  on  the  whole,  when  we, 
our  parrots  and  our  other  "  unknown  birds  of 
brilliant  plumage,"  filed  down  the  gang  plank 
at  Hoboken  we  were  a  tolerably  good-natured 
crowd. 

Will  any  of  the  little  groups  ever  meet 
again?  I  often  wonder.  It  seems  like  some 
thing  that  happened  a  century  ago  in  a  trop 
ical  dream. 


PARENTS   AND   CHILDREN 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

WHEN  I  was  considerably  younger 
than  I  am  now,  I  wrote  a  story  in 
which  appeared  the  following  two 
sentences :  "  It  always  seemed  to  Haydock 
that  men  and  women,  in  becoming  parents, 
somehow  or  other  managed  to  forfeit  a  great 
deal  of  intelligence.  He  intended  some  day 
to  ask  a  psychologist  with  children,  if  it  was 
a  provision  or  a  perversion  of  nature."  I  wish 
I  had  sufficient  space  in  which  to  reproduce 
some  of  the  many  peevish,  sarcastic  letters 
and  acrimonious  reviews  that  these  two  short 
sentences  called  forth.  For  some  reason  they 
seemed  to  hurt  feelings  and  arouse  ire  (I  don't 
quite  know  what  "  ire  "  means,  but  it  has  al 
ways  seemed  to  me  to  be  a  most  attractive 
little  word ;  so  short,  and  yet  so  bristling  with 
importance)  from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific. 
99 


PREJUDICES 

People  wrote  to  me  in  the  most  curiously  un 
restrained  fashion.  One  man  declared  I  had 
deliberately  insulted  my  mother  and  my  father. 
For  some  time  I  was  considerably  appalled.  I 
began  to  think  that  perhaps  I  had  said  some 
thing  juvenile,  thoughtless  and  silly,  but  since 
then  a  good  many  years  have  passed,  a  reac 
tion  long  since  set  in  and  I  find  that  now,  even 
if  I  am  not  prepared  exactly  to  stand  by  my 
original  guns,  my  position  in  the  matter  is  at 
least  that  of  an  agnostic.  Parents  may  not 
necessarily  forfeit  any  part  of  their  intelli 
gence,  but,  on  the  other  hand,  so  many  of 
them  seem  to,  that  one  pauses  now  and  then 
to  speculate  on  whether,  from  the  evidence, 
one  could  not  with  a  little  effort  deduce  a  law 
of  nature. 

Not  having  children  of  my  own,  I  of  course 
indulge  in  much  imaginative  bringing  up, 
from  the  earliest  years  to  the  time  when  they 
"  come  out  "  and  become  engaged,  get  mar 
ried  and  go  to  live  in  Alaska,  or  Brazil,  or  Chi 
cago.  Naturally,  my  children  are  much  better 
brought  up  than  are  those  of  people  who  actu- 
100 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

ally  possess  them.  I  admit  that  in  a  spectacu 
lar  sense  they  don't  strike  me  as  having  made 
a  very  much  greater  success  of  their  lives,  so 
far,  than  have  their  acquaintances  who  cannot 
claim  the  advantage  of  having  me  for  a  parent. 
They  are  not  particularly  rich,  although  the 
boys  seem  to  be  able  to  make  a  respectable  and 
steady  living.  Only  one  of  the  little  tribe  has 
as  yet  an  automobile,  and  she  married  it,  or 
rather  them,  as  her  husband  happens  to  be 
long  to  the  kind  of  American  family  that  col 
lects  new  kinds  of  motors  very  much  as  some 
persons  collect  new  kinds  of  picture  postal 
cards.  As  she  is  fond  of  her  husband,  I  don't 
in  the  least  mind  confessing  that  I  am  glad  he 
has  a  lot  of  money.  For,  self-reliant  and  in 
dependent  as  I  hope  to  be  to  the  last,  her  afflu 
ence  gives  me  the  comfortable  feeling  that,  no 
matter  what  happens,  I  shall  never  be  a  charge 
on  the  county  or  a  bother  to  the  good  Little 
Sisters  of  the  Poor.  Of  course  they  are  all 
crazy  about  me,  because  they  realize  that 
everything  I  did  was  for  the  best  and  that  I 
brought  them  up  so  remarkably  well. 
101 


PREJUDICES 

But  seriously,  to  go  back  to  my  original 
contention,  why  is  it  that  many  persons  who 
seemed  to  be  endowed  with  normal  intelligence 
irrevocably  mislay  it  when  they  begin  to  beget 
offspring?  They  do.  I  assert,  declare  and  in 
sist  that  they  do.  A  few  evenings  ago  I  went 
to  a  dinner,  and  at  about  the  time  the  coffee  ap 
peared  the  conversation  turned  upon  this  very 
topic.  One  of  the  men  said,  with  emphasis, 
that  he  had  certain  ideas  about  the  bringing 
up  of  children.  He  thought  they  were  good 
ideas,  but  his  wife  almost  always  opposed  them 
for  what,  in  his  opinion,  was  the  most  foolish 
of  reasons.  He  went  on  shaking  a  finger  at 
her  half  in  earnest,  half  in  jest.  "  She  often 
lets  the  children  do  things  of  which  I  disap 
prove,  because  other  parents  are  everywhere 
letting  their  children  do  these  things,"  he  said. 
"  Now  that  to  me  is  no  reason  at  all.  I  don't 
care  what  other  parents  are  allowing  their 
children  to  do.  I  know  what  I  want  my  chil 
dren  to  do,  and  not  to  do."  The  wife  smiled 
sweetly  and  admiringly,  and  I  knew  that, 
when  it  came  to  a  crisis,  she  would  always 
1 02 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

have  her  own,  possibly  misguided,  way.  She 
would  let  her  young  daughter  engage  in  the 
various  activities  her  little  set  happened  for 
the  moment  to  be  engaged  in,  and  he,  to  save 
discussion,  would  in  the  end  acquiesce.  To 
me  there  was  here  a  considerable  forfeiture 
of  intelligence  on  the  part  of  both.  The  man 
sacrificed  principle  to  peace,  the  woman  al 
lowed  herself  to  be  swayed  by  perhaps  idiotic, 
if  not  worse,  conventions  and  fashions  for 
which  she  secretly  did  not  care.  I  immediately 
began  to  wonder  what,  under  the  circum 
stances,  I  should  do  myself.  This  considera 
tion  over  a  good  cigar,  while  all  around  me 
the  Ballinger-Pinchot  controversy  was  being 
threshed  out  and  Dr.  Cook  was  sadly  and  with 
genuine  regret  disposed  of,  took  me  far  away 
from  the  dinner  table.  I  began  to  think  of 
my  own  bringing  up,  of  the  bringing  up  of 
various  local  families  who  in  the  press  are  usu 
ally  referred  to  as  "  prominent."  And  the  re 
sult  of  the  revery  seemed  to  be  that  although 
there  was  no  particular  scheme  of  education, 
no  very  definite  ideas  on  the  subject,  children 
8  103 


PREJUDICES 

in  the  end  seemed  to  grow  up  and,  as  the  Eng 
lish  say,  "  muddle  through  "  somehow.  But,  I 
found  myself  inquiring,  couldn't  there  be  some 
way  less  casual,  less  haphazard,  less  at  the 
mercy  of  the  trivial  and  the  contemporaneous? 
Being  a  bachelor  and  knowing  nothing  what 
ever  about  it,  I  of  course  feel  that  there  could. 
To  a  great  extent,  the  parents  I  know  seem  to 
be  lacking  in  standards ;  they  apparently,  from 
day  to  day,  trust  to  luck.  I  am  convinced  that, 
if  I  were  blessed  with  progeny,  I  should  evolve 
a  more  definite  manual  to  go  by ;  that  my  chil 
dren  wouldn't  be  allowed  merely  to  muddle 
through  as  best  they  could. 

In  the  first  place,  I  should  be  extremely  cau 
tious  about  their  reading.  Nothing,  after  all, 
is  so  influential  as  the  printed  word.  The  mere 
fact  that  it  is  printed  seems  to  carry  with  it 
a  kind  of  unjustified  authority.  Why  should 
little  boys  and  little  girls  have  access  to  our 
daily  papers,  full  from  end  to  end  of  horrible 
crimes,  tales  of  dishonesty  in  high  places  and 
advertisements  that  cause  the  mind  to  reel  at 
their  hypocrisy  and  rottenness?  Why  should 
104 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

they  be  permitted,  when  they  wish  to  read,  to 
take  from  the  Public  Library  the  latest  best 
seller  because  Sissy  Jones  has  just  read  it  and 
says  it  is  "  great  "  ?  I  should  never  allow  a 
child  of  mine  to  read  the  daily  papers,  and  I 
should  never  allow  it  to  read  the  thousand  and 
one  maudlin  children's  books  that  are  printed 
every  year  at  Christmas  time.  There  is  no 
reason  whatever  why,  at  an  early  age,  children 
should  not  be  supplied  with  good  literature 
just  as  they  are  fed  nourishing  food.  And  yet, 
how  comparatively  few  parents  think  of  this 
in  time!  They  buy  for  their  children  trivial, 
prettily  illustrated,  altogether  unimportant 
little  volumes  because  they  come  across  them 
on  a  counter  and  because  other  parents  are 
buying  the  same  things.  I  shouldn't  any  more 
supply  a  child  of  mine  with  this  sort  of  mental 
slop  than  I  should  feed  it  adulterated  milk. 
Why  deliberately  give  children  a  taste  for  the 
second-rate  and  third-rate  when  the  first-rate 
is  at  hand  and  they  are  at  an  age  when  they 
eagerly  seize  upon  anything  offered  them  ? 
This  is  a  question  for  which  I  can  think  of 

105 


PREJUDICES 

no  sensible,  logical  or  respectable  answer.  An 
other,  to  me,  absolutely  astounding  sin  of  the 
modern  parent  is  the  fashion  in  which  it  lets 
its  little  girls  and  boys  go  to  the  theater,  usu 
ally  to  matinees,  regardless  of  what  sort  of 
thing  is  being  performed.  The  Saturday 
matinee,  apparently,  has  become  an  institution, 
and  the  child  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  who  is  not 
permitted  to  buy  a  box  of  caramels  and  sit  in 
the  parquet  considers  himself  (much  more 
often  herself)  a  martyr.  About  six  months 
ago  I  went  to  an  afternoon  performance  of 
"  The  Merry  Widow,"  simply  because  the 
whole  world  seemed  to  be  talking  about  it  and 
I  had  an  erroneous  idea  that  I  ought  for  this 
reason  to  hear  it.  The  music  I  had  become 
sick  and  tired  of ;  the  book  I  found,  by  the  end 
of  the  first  act,  to  be  hopelessly  dull.  I  had 
paid  two  hard-earned  dollars  for  my  seat  and 
I  stayed  to  the  end,  to  the  scene  at  Maxim's, 
which,  as  done  in  this  country,  is  one  of  the 
most  altogether  nasty  things  I  have  ever  sat 
through  in  a  theater.  I  happen  to  have  been 
at  Maxim's,  on  various  occasions  at  every 
106 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

hour  from  seven  in  the  evening  until  eight 
the  next  morning,  but  I  have  never  seen  there 
anything  so  common,  so  indecent,  so  beastly  as 
the  sort  of  debauch  that  took  place  on  the  stage 
of  our  local  theaters.  Maxim's,  as  everyone 
knows,  is  a  fashionable  brothel,  now  owned  by 
an  English  and  American  stock  company.  It 
pays  dividends.  But  never  have  I  discovered 
there  anything  that  remotely  resembled  the  sort 
of  performance  I  saw  in  the  Maxim  act  of  our 
greatly  applauded  Savage's  "  Merry  Widow." 
I  mention  it  at  all,  only  because  sitting  next 
to  me  was  a  girl  of  fourteen  whom  I  have 
known  ever  since  she  was  born.  When  the  in 
decency  was  at  its  height,  when  the  orgy  had 
reached  a  climax,  she  turned  to  me  and  said 
with  a  sweet  enthusiasm,  "  It's  awfully  good, 
isn't  it !  "  Of  course  she  had  not  the  remotest 
idea  of  what  the  affair  signified,  but  why 
should  she  have  been  there  in  the  first  place? 
Why  should  an  American  girl  of  fourteen  be 
introduced  to  the  representation  of  a  Parisian 
restaurant  (to  put  it  most  conservatively) 
represented  with  infinitely  more  coarseness 
107 


PREJUDICES 

than  is  ever  found  in  the  original  ?  She  was 
there  because  her  friends,  her  "  set,"  were 
there.  Mamma,  abandoning  much  of  her 
original  intelligence,  let  her  go  because  Muriel 
Smith  and  Gladys  Jones  and  Dorothy  Robin 
son  always  went  to  the  matinee  when  they 
wanted  to,  and  their  mothers  were  all  women 
of  considerable  social  importance. 

Positively  I  am  aghast  when  I  pause  to 
think  of  the  almost  accidental  fashion  in  which 
so  many  American  children  are  brought  up. 
Their  parents  love  them  and  adore  them,  they 
do  for  them  everything  in  the  world  except 
what  seems  to  me  to  be  the  right  thing.  In 
stead  of  endeavoring  to  lash  them  to  the  good 
old  mast,  they  have  such  a  way  of  letting  them 
drift  with  the  contemporary  tide!  Few  things 
in  life  are  to  me  at  once  so  engaging,  so 
pathetic  and  so  repellent  as  a  street-car  load  of 
boys  and  girls  who  have  just  come  from  the 
high  school ;  the  girls  with  their  pompadours 
and  their  rats,  their  Latin  grammars,  their 
giggling  and  their  ogling ;  the  boys,  nice  boys, 
but  with  such  grotesque  trousers,  flashy  shoes 
1 08 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

and  absurd  hats.  Why  doesn't  some  one  in 
authority  give  them  less  objectionable  ideas  on 
the  subject  of  dress,  of  conduct,  of,  in  short, 
life?  They  are  really  the  most  dreadful, 
trashy,  tiresome  little  creatures.  It  is  a  con 
stant  marvel  to  me  that  so  many  of  them,  in  a 
few  years,  without  parental  or  outside  aid, 
abandon  their  revolting  ways  and  become  per 
fectly  good  men  and  women.  I  admit  with 
gladness  that  we  do  seem  somehow  to  muddle 
through. 

Wouldn't  it,  however,  be  better  if  children 
were  brought  up  as  my  suppositions  infants 
are  brought  up?  Or  would  it  in  the  long  run 
make  any  particular  difference?  In  the  first 
place,  the  mother  of  my  children  doesn't  spend 
entire  days  at  country  clubs  or  the  houses  of 
friends  playing  bridge  whist.  She  stays  at 
home  a  good  deal  and  plays  with  the  children 
instead,  because  she  likes  to  and  because  they 
like  to  have  her.  Few  sights  are  more  depress 
ing,  give  one  a  more  nauseating  sensation, 
cause  one  to  form  a  lower  estimate  of  human 
ity,  than  a  roomful  of  overdressed  American 
109 


PREJUDICES 

mothers  hectically  playing  bridge;  and  it  is  a 
sight  one  may  see  almost  every  day  in  the  year 
from  one  end  of  the  country  to  the  other. 

In  the  second  place,  why  should  children  be 
allowed  to  stuff  their  little  insides  with  candy 
merely  because  they  seem  to  like  it?  A 
southern  cousin  of  mine  used  to  pick  out  the 
best  pieces  in  a  box  of  candy  and  eat  them 
himself,  remarking,  "  We  shall  leave  the  hair- 
oil  and  lip-salve  varieties  for  the  children,  as 
all  children  are  natural  scavengers."  This  may 
be  true,  but  I  should  protest  vehemently  against 
their  being  allowed  to  scavenge.  That  chil 
dren  should  be  permitted  to  ruin  their  diges 
tions,  that  they  should  ever  be  given  any  form 
of  food  that  isn't  good  for  them,  strikes  me 
as  a  parental  crime.  Parents  have  the  entire 
matter  in  their  hands;  they  are,  or  ought  to 
be,  the  supreme  court,  the  lawr.  Why  not  de 
cide  for  the  best  instead  of  for  the  slipshod 
half  way,  or  the  worst? 

Thirdly,  I  endeavor  to  give  the  little  crea 
tures  for  whom  I  am  imaginatively  responsible, 
in  addition  to  robust  health,  which,  after  all, 
no 


PARENTS    AND    CHILDREN 

one  is  often  inclined  to  consider  the  main,  the 
only  thing,  certain  intellectual  resources  that, 
even  should  their  health  fail  later  on,  they  can 
fall  back  upon  with  much  enjoyment;  re 
sources  that  later  on  it  is  difficult  to  acquire 
for  oneself.  I  like  them  to  have  an  acquaint 
ance  with  the  best  books  and  the  greatest  pic 
tures,  to  know  just  why  they  are  good  and 
great  even  if  they  have  not  actually  seen  them. 
I  also  endeavor  to  give  them  a  practical  knowl 
edge  of  at  least  two  languages  not  their  own. 
Every  child  in  our  high  schools  makes  a  futile 
stab  at  French  or  German.  How  few  make 
of  them  a  precious  possession !  As  one  grows 
older  there  is  almost  no  pleasure  greater  than 
the  ability  to  read  with  ease  a  book  in  a  for 
eign  language;  to  realize  that,  while  the 
medium  is  different,  the  humanity  underlying 
it  is  the  same.  An  understanding  of  foreign 
languages,  more  than  anything  else,  helps  on 
the  universal  brotherhood  of  man. 

Fourthly,  I  never  allow  my  children  to  go 
to  the  theater  because  Sissy  Jones  is  allowed 
to  go.     Now  and  then  something  locally  hap- 
iii 


PREJUDICES 

pens  that  strikes  me  as  amusing,  or  instructive 
or,  happily,  both.  We  then  all  go  and  have  a 
grand  time.  But  why  should  they  be  allowed 
to  form  the  habit  of  going  to  everything  that 
comes  along?  At  the  dinner  to  which  I  have 
referred,  an  Irish  woman  told  me  she  had 
never  been  inside  of  a  theater  until  after  her 
marriage,  and  she  is  one  of  the  most  charm 
ing,  highly  educated,  cultivated  women  of  my 
acquaintance. 

But  no  doubt  my  jewels  will  after  all,  in 
spite  of  me,  be  the  same  source  of  mixed 
pleasure  and  responsibility  that  most  jewelry 
is. 


WHAT   IS   EDUCATION? 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

BOOKS,  the  titles  of  which  are  interrog 
atory,  always  have  a  fascination  for 
me.  "What  is  Ibsenism?"  "  Can 
You  Forgive  Her?"  "What  Shall  We  Do 
With  Our  Girls?"  for  instance.  Of  course, 
they  are  invariably  unsatisfactory  and,  some 
times,  exasperating.  They  never  really  answer 
the  questions  they  propound,  and  they  leave 
one  somewhat  more  muddled  than  one  was 
before.  Tolstoi's  "  What  is  Art?  "  is  a  most 
bigoted  and  tedious  performance.  In  it  one  of 
the  greatest  artists  of  modern  times  elaborately 
tells  one  nothing  whatever  about  art,  and 
leaves  one  with  the  impression  that  his  claim 
on  immortality  is  something  of  which  he  has 
become  very  much  ashamed.  But,  crafty  old 
person  though  I  be,  I  succumb  to  them  all,  and 
read  them  because  I  can't  resist  a  title  in  the 
form  of  a  question. 


PREJUDICES 

At  present,  I  am  longing  for  someone  to 
write  a  book  and  call  it  "  What  Is  Educa 
tion  ?  "  What,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  is  educa 
tion?  Every  few  days  someone,  in  endeavor 
ing  to  describe  and  sum  up  someone  else,  ends 
with  the  clinching  statement :  "  And  the 
strange  part  of  it  was  that  he  was  a  man,  or 
she  was  a  woman,  of  education."  This  is  sup 
posed  to  settle  the  matter — to  arouse  in  one's 
mind  a  definite  image.  "  He  was  a  man  of 
education,"  apparently  means  something,  but 
what  ?  To  me  it  has  come  to  mean  nothing  at 
all.  A  short  time  ago  I  read  in  the  morning 
paper  of  a  dead  body  that  had  been  found  in 
the  river  and  taken  to  the  county  morgue. 
"  All  means  of  identification  had  been  re 
moved,"  wrote  the  reporter,  in  commenting  on 
the  incident,  "  but,"  he  added,  "  the  body  was 
evidently  that  of  a  man  of  education."  And, 
to  me,  the  remarkable  part  of  this  was  that 
the  reporter,  without  doubt,  had  a  hazy  idea  of 
what  he  was  trying  to  express.  In  the  poor, 
dead,  unidentified  thing  he  had  discovered  and 
recognized  something  that,  to  him,  implied 
116 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

"  education,"  but  how  he  did  it,  and  what  it 
was,  I  don't  know,  because  he  did  not  explain. 
There  are  in  this  connection  all  sorts  of 
questions  I  hope  the  author  of  the  book,  to 
which  I  look  forward,  will  answer.  Is,  for  in 
stance,  "  a  man  of  education  "  the  same  as  "  an 
educated  man  "  ?  Or  is  one,  perhaps,  some 
what  more — well,  more  educated  than  the 
other?  At  times  both  these  phrases  sound  to 
me  as  if  they  meant  precisely  the  same  thing, 
and  then  again  they  suddenly,  through  no 
wish  of  mine,  develop  subtle  but  important  dif 
ferences  that  cause  first  the  one  and  then  the 
other  to  seem  expressive  of  a  higher,  a  more 
comprehensive,  form  of  education.  Then,  too, 
is  there  any  particular  point  at  which  education 
leaves  off  and  "cultivation"  begins?  And 
can  a  person  be  "  cultivated  "  without  being 
educated?  The  words  education  and  cultiva 
tion  are  constantly  upon  the  American  tongue, 
but  what  do  they  mean?  Or,  do  they  mean 
something  entirely  different  to  everyone  who 
employs  them?  Every  American  girl  who 
flirts  her  way  through  the  high  school  is  "  edu- 
117 


PREJUDICES 

cated,"  and  it  would  be  indeed  a  brave  man 
who  dared  to  suggest  that  she  wasn't.     But  is 
she?    (Heaven    forbid   that   /   should   suggest 
anything;   I   merely  crave  information.)   And 
here  let  me  hasten  to  add  that  a  friend  of  mine 
has  always  maintained,  quite  seriously,  that  he 
likes  me  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  I  am,  as  he 
expresses  it,  "  one  of  the  most  illiterate  per 
sons  "  of  his  acquaintance.     His  acquaintance, 
it  is  some  slight  comfort  to  remember,  is  not 
large,  and  he  is  a  doctor  of  philosophy  who 
lectures  at  one  of  the  great  English  universi 
ties.     Not  only  has  he  read  and  studied  much, 
his  memory   is  appalling;  he  has  never   for 
gotten  anything.     From  his  point  of  view  I 
am  not  "  an  educated  person."     But  then,  in 
the  opinion  of  Macaulay,  Addison  was  sadly 
lacking  in  cultivation!     "He  does  not  appear 
to  have  attained  more  than  an  ordinary  ac 
quaintance  with  the  political  and  moral  writers 
of  Rome ;  nor  wras  his  own  Latin  prose  by  any 
means   equal   to   his   Latin    verse,"   Macaulay 
complains  in  the  Edinburgh  Rei'iciv  in   1843. 
And    while    Macaulay    admits    that    "  Great 
118 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

praise  is  due  to  the  notes  which  Addison  ap 
pended  to  his  version  of  the  second  and  third 
books  of  the  Metamorphoses,"  and  confess 
them  to  be  "  rich  in  apposite  references  to 
Virgil,  Stetius  and  Claudian,"  he  cannot  un 
derstand  anyone's  failing  to  allude  to  Eurip 
ides  and  Theocritus,  waxes  indignant  over 
the  fact  that  Addison  quoted  more  from  Au- 
sonius  and  Manilius  than  from  Cicero,  and 
feels  positively  hurt  at  his  having  cited  "  the 
languid  hexameters  of  Silius  Italicus,"  rather 
than  the  "  authentic  narrative  of  Polybius." 
In  Rome  and  Florence — Macaulay  continues, 
more  in  sorrow  than  in  anger — Addison  saw 
all  the  best  ancient  works  of  art,  "  without  re 
calling  one  single  verse  of  Pindar,  of  Calli- 
machus,  or  of  the  Attic  dramatists." 

Of  course  all  this  is  very  sad  and  leaves  us 
quite  cross  with  Addison  for  having  deluded 
us  into  believing  him  to  be  a  person  of  con 
siderable  erudition.  How  could  anybody  in 
the  presence  of  a  statue  be  so  absent-minded 
as  not  to  recall  a  single  verse  of  Pindar  or 
Callimachus?  And  how  hopelessly  superficial 

9  119 


PREJUDICES 

must  be  the  mind  that  actually  prefers  the 
languid  hexameters  of  Silius  Italicus  to  the 
authentic  narrative  of  Polybius!  Yet,  on  the 
other  hand,  if  we  casually  referred  to  Polybius 
while  conversing  with  most  of  our  educated 
and  even  so-called  cultivated  acquaintances, 
how  many  of  them,  I  wonder,  would  know 
whether  we  were  talking  about  a  Greek  his 
torian  or  a  patent  medicine.  Macaulay  would 
have  considered  them  hopeless;  we  (and  they) 
are  in  the  habit  (perhaps  it  is  a  very  bad  habit 
—I  don't  know)  of  regarding  them  as  edu 
cated. 

Another  question  that  my  suppositions 
author  must  devote  a  chapter  to,  is  the  differ 
ence  between  just  an  education  and  a  "  liberal  " 
education.  We  used  to  hear  much  more  about 
a  "  liberal  "  education  than  we  do  now,  al 
though  Prexy  Eliot  has  of  late  endeavored  to 
restore  the  phrase  as  well  as  the  thing  itself. 
When  does  an  education  leave  off  being  pe 
nurious,  so  to  speak,  and  become  liberal  ?  Ac 
cording  to  Mr.  Eliot,  Milton's  "  Areopagitica  " 
helps  a  lot.  I  once  read  Milton's  "Areopagi- 
120 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

tica  "  ("but  not  for  love")  with  great  care, 
and  when  I  had  finished  it  I  had  to  procure 
at  much  trouble  and  expense  another  book 
(written  some  hundreds  of  years  later)  that 
told  me  what  it  was  all  about.  The  next  day 
I  passed  an  examination  in  the  subject — and 
to-day  I  couldn't,  if  my  life  were  at  stake,  re 
call  the  nature  or  the  purpose  of  the  work  in 
question  or  even  explain  the  meaning  of  the 
title.  It  is  possible,  of  course,  that  this  is 
more  my  fault  than  Milton's,  but  whoever  is  to 
blame,  I  can  truthfully  say  that  never  before 
or  since  have  I  read  anything  so  completely 
uninteresting  or  that  contributed  so  little  to 
the  liberality  of  my  education.  In  Mr.  Eliot's 
opinion,  however,  and  no  one  more  firmly  be 
lieves  in  the  soundness  of  Mr.  Eliot's  opinions 
than  I  do,  this  ghastly,  unintelligible,  jaw- 
breaking  relic  of  the  seventeenth  century  is, 
if  not  absolutely  essential  to  a  liberal  educa 
tion,  at  least  highly  conducive  to  one.  What 
on  earth  does  it  all  signify? 

Some  persons  pin  their  entire  faith  to  a  cor 
rect  use  of  the  pronouns  7  and  me.     They 
121 


PREJUDICES 

cheerfully  commit  every  other  form  of  lin 
guistic  violence,  but  as  long  as  they  can  pre 
serve  sufficient  presence  of  mind  boldly  to  say 
once  in  so  often  something  like,  "  He  left 
James  and  me  behind,"  instead  of  resorting  to 
the  cowardly  "  James  and  myself,"  or  the 
elegantly  ungrammatical  "  James  and  I,"  they 
feel  that  their  educational  integrity  has  been 
preserved.  Others  believe  that  education  and 
true  refinement  begin  and  end  with  always  say 
ing,  "  You  would  better,"  instead  of  "  You 
had  better,"  while  Mr.  Eliot,  in  musing  on  the 
career  of  Mr.  Roosevelt,  no  doubt  remarks  to 
himself,  "  An  estimable,  even  an  interesting 
man,  but  is  he,  after  all,  conversant  with  the 
'  Areopagitica  '?  "  (I  hate  to  admit  it,  but  I 
think  it  highly  probable  that. he  is.)  And  Ma- 
caulay,  in  the  book  review  from  which  I  have 
quoted,  disposes  once  and  for  all  of  a  certain 
scholar  named  Blackmore — rips  open  his  in 
tellectual  back,  in  fact,  by  stating  with  dignified 
disgust :  "  Of  Blackmore's  attainments  in  the 
ancient  tongues,  it  may  be  sufficient  to  say 
that,  in  his  prose,  he  has  confounded  an  apho- 
122 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

rism  with  an  apothegm."  Isn't  it  all  wonder 
ful  ?  And  doesn't  it  make  you  wish  that  some 
one  would  write  a  work  called,  "  What  Is  Edu 
cation  ?  "  so  you  could  find  out  whether  you 
were  educated  or  not? 

Of  late  I  have  begun  to  have  an  ineradical 
conviction  that  I  am  not — and  this,  not  be 
cause  I  have  a  perverse  fondness  for  the 
"  languid  "  vocabulary  of  Silius  Italicus  (of 
whom,  of  course,  I  never  had  heard)  but  be 
cause  I  apparently  know  so  little  about  the 
idiom  that,  by  inheritance  and  environment, 
I  am  privileged  to  call  my  own.  Not  long  ago, 
in  reading  a  passage  of  excellent  English  prose, 
I  came  across  a  word  that  suddenly,  as  words 
have  a  devilish  way  of  doing,  stood  out  from 
the  page  and  challenged  me.  The  word  was 
"  nadir."  "  At  this  period  he  was  at  the  nadir 
of  his  fortunes,"  was,  I  think,  the  sentence  in 
which  it  occurred,  and  from  the  context  I  was 
able  to  divine  not  the  exact  meaning  of  the 
term,  but  the  general  idea  it  expressed.  It 
meant,  I  could  see,  that  the  person  in  question 
had  experienced  a  run  of  bad  luck,  that  his  af- 
123 


PREJUDICES 

fairs,  for  the  time  being,  were  in  anything  but 
a  prosperous  condition.  But  this  was  very 
far  from  knowing  the  specific  meaning  of  the 
word  "  nadir."  It  was  obviously  a  noun,  and 
a  simple-looking  little  creature  at  that,  yet  I 
neither  knew  how  to  pronounce  it  nor  what  it 
meant.  So  I  made  a  note  of  it,  intending, 
later,  to  inform  myself.  Further  on,  I  came  to 
the  word  "  apogee,"  a  familiar  combination  of 
letters  that  suddenly  appeared  to  be  perfectly 
absurd.  The  gentleman  referred  to  was  now 
no  longer  at  the  nadir  of  his  fortunes — he  was 
at  the  "  apogee  "  of  them,  and,  of  course,  I 
was  able  to  guess  that  something  agreeable  had 
happened  to  him  of  late.  But  what,  after  all, 
was  an  apogee  ?  I  had  often  read  the  word  be 
fore,  and  I  feel  sure  that  it  may  be  found  here 
and  there  among  my  "  complete  works,"  em 
ployed  with  an  air  of  authority.  But,  upon 
my  soul,  I  didn't  know  what  it  meant,  and, 
therefore,  virtuously  made  another  little  note. 

Once  started  upon  this  mad  career  of  disil 
lusionment,  there  seemed  to  be  absolutely  no 
end  to  it,  and  I  read  on  and  on,  no  longer  for 
124 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

the  pleasure  of  reading,  but  more  because  the 
book  had  become  like  one  of  those  electric  ma 
chines  with  metal  handles,  where,  after  turn 
ing  on  the  current  with  a  cent,  you  hang  on 
in  interesting  agony  because  you  can't  let  go. 
"  Not  one  jot  nor  tittle !  "  I  groaned  as  I  wrote 
it  down.  "  Jot,"  as  a  verb,  conveyed  some 
thing  to  me,  but  what  was  it  when  it  became 
a  noun?  And  what  sort  of  a  thing,  for 
heaven's  sake,  was  a  "  tittle  "  ?  It  sounded 
more  like  a  kitchen  utensil  than  anything  else. 
(Polly,  put  the  tittle  on —  No,  that  wouldn't 
do.)  And  why,  also,  were  jots  and  tittles  such 
inseparable  companions?  In  all  my  life  I  had 
never  met  a  solitary  tittle — a  tittle  walking 
about  alone,  so  to  speak,  unaccompanied  by  a 
devoted  jot.  Why  was  it  that  when  I  did 
meet  them,  hand  in  hand,  as  usual,  I  didn't 
know  what  they  were? 

By  this  time  I  was  beginning  to  be  verbally 
groggy.  What,  I  wondered,  was — or,  rather, 
wasn't — "a  scintilla  of  evidence"?  (For, 
oddly  enough,  one  is  never  informed  that  there 
is  a  scintilla  of  evidence,  but  merely  that  there 
125 


PREJUDICES 

isn't.)  And  just  how  did  it  happen,  in  the  first 
place,  that  a  lack  of  evidence  should  have  been 
called  a  "  scintilla,"  whereas  a  certain  kind  of 
expensive  gray  fur  was  called  a  "  chinchilla." 
Scintilla  chinchilla,  scintilla  chinchilla — the 
jury  was  unable  to  find  a  chinchilla  of  evi 
dence,  although  Mrs.  Vasterbolt  was  present  at 
the  trial  in  a  handsome  coat  of  the  costliest 
scintilla.  Why  not?  But  as  madness  seemed 
to  be  lurking  in  that  direction,  I  hastened  fev 
erishly  on  to  "  adamant."  Oh,  yes,  I  know 
it's  something  very  hard  and  unyielding  and, 
in  the  kind  of  novels  that  no  one  reads  any 
more,  someone  is,  at  a  critical  moment,  always 
"  as  "  it — never  "  like  "  it.  But  what  is  it  ? 
It  might  be  some  sort  of  a  mythological  cliff 
against  which  people  were  supposed  ineffectu 
ally  to  have  hurled  themselves;  it  might  be  a 
kind  of  metal,  or  a  particularly  durable  pre 
cious  stone,  or  a  satisfactory  species  of  paving 
material.  It  might  be  any  old  thing;  I  don't 
know.  What  in  the  dickens  does  it  mean  to 
"  dree  your  own  weird  "  ?  For,  as  I  almost 
tore  off  a  page  in  my  anxiety  to  turn  it,  my 
126 


WHAT    IS    EDUCATION? 

eyes  caught  sight  of :  "  '  Everyone  must  dree 
his  own  weird/  she  answered,  sententiously." 
Early  in  life  it  had  dawned  on  me  that  to  be 
told  you  must  "  dree  your  own  weird  "  was 
merely  a  more  obscure  and  delicate  fashion  of 
telling  you  that  you  must  "  skin  your  own 
skunk  " ;  and  yet  I  very  much  doubt  if  the 
verb  "  to  dree  "  means  to  skin,  or  if  "  weird," 
used  as  a  noun,  has  much  connection  with  the 
fragrant  little  denizen  of  our  forests  whom 
we  all,  I  trust,  are  accustomed  to  refer  to  as 
the  mephitis  Americana. 

On  and  on  I  toiled  for  another  hour,  at 
the  end  of  which  time  I  had  a  formidable 
list  of  ordinary  words  belonging  to  my  own 
language,  as  to  whose  real  meaning  I  was 
completely  in  the  dark.  To-day  I  intended  to 
look  them  all  up  and  write  a  charming  little 
paper  on  them,  primarily  designed,  of  course, 
to  make  dear  reader  gasp  at  the  scope  and 
thoroughness  of  my  education.  But  the  day  is 
indescribably  hot,  and,  as  I  have  been  away, 
my  dictionary,  unfortunately,  is  gritty  with 
dust.  To  get  up  and  slap  at  the  corpulent 
127 


PREJUDICES 

thing  with  a  damp  towel  would  be  most  repul 
sive.  I  shan't  do  it.  Instead  I  shall  recall 
that  the  most  intellectual  nation  in  the  world 
has  a  saying  to  the  effect  that,  "  On  pent  etrc 
fort  instruit  sans  avoir  d' education" 


JUST   A   LETTER 


JUST    A    LETTER 

THE  other  day  I  received  a  letter  from 
an  old  friend  of  mine  with  whom  I 
have  talked  for  many  years  now, 
only  in  long  letters  at  long  intervals.  He  is 
a  man  of  about  thirty-seven,  but  he  still  writes 
long  letters.  This  one,  like  all  the  others,  is 
pleasant  in  spots,  and  I  have  therefore  sub 
mitted  it  to  a  sort  of  epistolary,  dry-cleanjng 
process  and  extracted  some  of  the  spots.  Here 
they  are : — 

As  you  see,  I  am  at  Newport.  I  have  been 
visiting-  various  persons  here  for  almost  a 
month  now,  and  as  the  glory  will  have  soon  de 
parted,  or  rather,  as  /  shall  have  soon  departed, 
I  thought  I  should  give  you  a  vicarious  whiff 
of  high  life  while  I  can. 

It  is  a  rather  hot  day  for  Newport,  but  in 
this  vast  and  lovely  room,  at  a  long  window 
opening  on  a  cliff  covered  with  mauve  heather, 


PREJUDICES 

and  with  the  sea  beyond,  1  don't  in  the  least 
mind.  I  don't  think  I  should  mind  anything 
very  much.  1  don't  even  mind  that  just  out 
side  a  man  is  pushing  a  lawn  mower  back  and 
forth  on  the  faultless  turf,  although  the  sound 
of  his  performance  makes  me  feel  as  if  all  my 
teeth  were  loose.  They  probably  are.  Indeed, 
after  a  dinner,  a  late  dance,  and  the  remaining 
few  hours  of  last  night  spent  in  playing  bridge, 
my  fearless  little  mirror  tells  me  this  morning 
that  I  look  quite  all  of  twenty-six.  One  hears 
much  about  the  follies  of  the  rich,  but  I  am 
beginning  to  feel  that  they  are  as  nothing  com 
pared  to  the  follies  of  the  poor.  For  the  paltry 
sum  I  last  night  lost  to  a  man  worth  eighteen 
or  twenty  millions  is  almost  the  exact  sum  I 
meant  to  distribute  among  the  servants  of  my 
hostess  when  I  gracefully  make  room  for 
somebody  else  on  the  day  after  to-morrow. 
Before  I  began  to  write  to  you,  I  made  no 
end  of  hectic  little  calculations  on  the  back  of 
an  envelope,  but  as  yet  they  don't  seem  to  be 
leading  me  anywhere  except  into  the  hands  of 
a  receiver.  However — 
132 


JUST    A    LETTER 

I've  had  an  exceedingly  good  time  here. 
Theoretically,  a  person  who  leads  the  kind  of 
life  I  do  ought  to  have  spent  his  vacation 
otherwise.  I  know  that  if  I  had  consulted  the 
oracles  who  answer  "  Troubled  Subscriber," 
they,  one  and  all,  would  have  answered,  "  Get 
out  into  the  open,  or  the  cool,  quiet  depths  of 
the  forest.  Get  into  touch  with  Mother  Nature 
and  commune  with  her.  Her  bosom  is  large 
(and  covered  with  ants).  She  loves  her  tired 
children."  But  I  did  nothing  of  the  sort.  In 
stead  of  getting  into  the  forest,  I  got  into  the 
cool,  quiet  depths  of  a  sea-going  automobile, 
with  a  handful  of  orchids  swaying  in  a  glass- 
and-silver  vase  in  front  of  me,  and  came  to 
Newport.  What  I  needed  just  then  was  not 
taking  long  tramps  and  cooking  my  own  in 
digestible  meals  in  a  frying  pan,  reposing  on 
a  lumpy  heap  of  pine  needles  and  getting 
drowned  every  other  night  at  half-past  eleven, 
anointing  mosquito  bites  and  falling  over  logs. 
Not  a  bit  of  it.  I  yearned  instead  for  an  ex 
quisite  bedroom  and  salon  overhanging  a  sap 
phire  and  diamond  sea,  a  young  man — whose 

133 


PREJUDICES 

very  presence  created  a  deeper  silence— to 
wake  me  in  the  morning,  to  draw  a  bath,  to 
lay  out  my  clothes,  to  bring  me  my  breakfast 
on  china  that  had  once  belonged  to  Madame 
de  Pompadour.  I  wanted  to  arise  late  and 
mingle  with  perfectly  dressed,  good-looking, 
agreeable  people,  who  seemed  to  be  enjoying 
themselves  and  who,  if  they  ever  did  have  an 
noying,  serious  or  sad  moments,  never  let  one 
know  about  it.  I  wanted  to  go  to  large,  gay 
luncheons  at  half-past  two,  and  larger,  gayer 
dinners  at  half-past  eight  or  nine,  with  golf 
and  rides  and  drives,  and  other  people  and  tea 
in  between.  I  wanted  to  see  lots  of  young 
girls  who  looked  like  hot-house  flowers  and 
who  would  decide  to  be  charming  to  me  be 
cause  they  knew  that  7  knew  it  would  be  out 
of  the  question  to  try  to  marry  them,  and  I 
wanted  to  talk  to  incredibly  youthful  looking 
old  women  with  marvelously  arranged,  dyed 
hair,  high  diamond  collars  to  conceal  the 
wattles,  and  ropes  of  pearls,  with  which  to  run 
through  nervous,  jeweled  fingers. 

Well,  all  this  I  have  done  and  seen   for  a 
134 


JUST    A    LETTER 

month  now,  and,  as  I  said,  I  have  greatly  en 
joyed  myself.  I  suppose  you  know,  of  course, 
that  Newport,  Rhode  Island,  does  not,  in  the 
least,  resemble  the  Newport  that  the  American 
people  read  about  in  newspapers — that  the 
Newport  of  the  newspapers  does  not,  in  fact, 
exist.  To  multitudes  of  our  fellow  country 
men  this  would  be  not  only  unwelcome,  but 
incredible  news.  Yet  it  is  a  curious  truth. 
The  great  American  people  (dear,  old,  great, 
American  people!)  like  to  think  of  this  ex 
traordinarily  healthful  and  beautiful  spot  as 
being,  at  the  worst,  a  kind  of  dazzling  den  of 
vice,  and,  at  the  best,  a  resort  where  semi- 
idiotic  families  possessing  great  wealth  may, 
with  impunity,  concoct  grotesque  and  vulgar 
— and  ever  more  vulgar — diversions  for  all 
the  rest  of  our  completely  moral,  intellectual, 
high-minded  and  desirable  population  to  sneer 
at.  Around  the  mythical  Newport  of  editors 
and  reporters  has  grown  a  tradition  and  a 
stock  of  phrases  that  the  country  at  large 
eagerly  swallows  whole.  I  don't  suppose  there 
is  a  paragrapher  in  any  state  of  the  Union  who 
10  135 


PREJUDICES 

could  possibly  grind  out  four  lines  about  New 
port  without  employing  the  words  "  monkey 
dinner,"  although  there  has  never  been  such  a 
thing  as  a  monkey  dinner  at  Newport  (what 
ever  a  monkey  dinner  may  be),  and  nobody 
who  lives  and  entertains  here  in  summer  has 
the  slightest  idea  of  what  the  thing  means. 
Originally,  no  doubt,  the  fiction  of  a  repor- 
torial  mind,  it  has  become,  through  repetition 
and  the  course  of  time,  as  much  of  an  estab 
lished  fact  to  the  nation  as  the  Washington 
monument  or  the  Civil  War. 

The  country  in  general  believes,  I  am  sure, 
that  a  dinner  party  here  is  merely  a  euphoni 
ous  term  for  a  debauch — but,  of  course,  you 
know  as  well  as  I  do  that  a  Newport  dinner 
resembles  precisely  a  similar  festivity  every 
where  else  in  the  world  where  there  is  great 
wealth  and  the  strange  state  of  mind  known 
as  "  fashion."  Here  there  is  sometimes — 
often,  perhaps, — rather  too  rriuch  pomp  and 
circumstance,  more  servants  and  American 
beauties  and  jewels  than  the  particular  oc 
casion  justifies.  In  Europe  I  have  dined  at 

136 


JUST    A    LETTER 

great  embassies  in  the  company  of  famous  and 
important  personages,  with  far  less  fuss, 
feathers  and  war  paint  than  I  have  been  ac 
customed  to  during  the  past  month,  when  I 
would  dine,  for  instance,  with  a  man  whose 
father  had  amassed  millions  from  ready-made 
clothing,  and  whose  party  consisted  of  a  few 
of  his  equally  unimportant  acquaintances.  The 
whole  thing  (given  the  kind  of  thing)  is,  with 
out  question,  very  perfectly  and  beautifully 
done;  but  equally  without  question  it  is,  most 
of  the  time,  very  much  overdone.  It  has  so 
often  occurred  to  me  as  I  made  myself  agree 
able  to  the  skinny,  be-powdered  nakedness  of 
the  lady  next  to  me  (maybe  you  don't  know 
it,  but  I  have  a  reputation  for  an  ability  to 
amuse  any  woman  who  has  passed  the  age  of 
sixty-five,  and  I,  therefore,  always  take  in 
someone  who  looks  like  the  galvanized  re 
mains  of  Rameses  II),  that  there  was  no  real, 
no  justifiable  reason  for  so  much  formality 
and  splendor.  There  really  isn't,  you  know. 
It  is  not  at  all  as  it  is  in  England,  for  ex 
ample,  where  political  ambitions  must  be 

137 


PREJUDICES 

furthered  and  the  prestige  of  great  and  ancient 
names  maintained.  Here  there  are  widely 
known  names  (that  of  my  last  night's  hostess 
may  be  seen  over  the  entrance  of  a  large  and 
bad  hotel),  but  they  are  neither  great  nor 
what  one  is  accustomed  to  consider  ancient ; 
and  as  for  politics,  when  politics  become  neces 
sary  to  these  people,  they  merely,  and  with  a 
light  heart,  hire  a  United  States  senator  to  do 
whatever  dirty  work  the  situation  demands. 
Splendor  here  is  indulged  in  purely  for  its  own 
sake.  There  is  absolutely  nothing  behind  it 
except  unlimited  means. 

But,  even  so,  neither  the  "  entertainments  " 
nor  the  persons  who  give  them,  are  at  all  like 
the  nation's  fixed  idea  of  them.  The  former, 
if  you  like,  are  unnecessary  and  super-elab 
orate,  but  they  are  always  beautiful  in  their 
way,  and  decorous;  the  latter,  more  often  than 
not,  are  extremely  interesting  and  often  charm 
ing.  Why  shouldn't  they  be?  For  daily,  since 
I  have  been  here,  it  has  come  over  me  with 
a  sense  of  having  discovered  the  fact  that 
"  human  nature  is  pretty  much  the  same  every- 

138 


JUST    A    LETTER 

where."  There  are  intelligent,  clever,  sym 
pathetic,  altogether  delightful  men  and  women0 
here,  and  also  men  and  women  who  are,  by 
nature,  dull,  narrow,  tiresome  or  common,  just 
as  there  are  in  every  habitable  region  of  the 
globe.  But  stupidity  for  stupidity,  common 
ness  for  commonness,  bore  for  bore,  I  confess 
that  the  stupid,  common  bore  of  these  regions 
is  much  less  wearisome  than  he  is  in  regions 
less  splendid.  He  (or  she)  has  in  his  favor 
all  sorts  of  things  that,  while  they  do  not  make 
him  interesting  or  worth  one's  time,  at  least 
furnish  him  with  a  variety  of  avenues  of 
approach — if  you  know  what  I  mean.  Essen 
tially  limited  though  he  be,  as  far  as  his  intel 
lect  and  sympathies  are  concerned,  mere  sordid 
wealth  had  usually  forced  upon  him  certain 
contacts  and  habits  and  experiences  that  you 
can  understand  and  can  talk  about.  There  is 
about  him,  somewhere,  a  neutral  ground  on 
which  for  the  time  being  you  can  get  together 
in  a  way  you  simply  can't  with  the  same  sort 
of  nonentity  who  has  not  been  subjected  to  the 
same  sort  of  influences.  Stupidity  for  stu- 

139 


PREJUDICES 

pidity,  commonness  for  commonness,  bore  for 
bore,  I,  after  all,  prefer  that  of  Newport  to 
that  of  Saugdunk,  Maine,  or  Pekin,  Kansas. 
In  the  long  run,  of  course,  they  are  both  ex 
actly  the  same,  and  both  very  awful.  The 
difference  betwreen  them  is  the  difference  be 
tween  taking  a  dose  of  castor  oil  enveloped  in 
an  expensive  capsule  and  taking  it  straight. 

I  like  many  of  the  people  I  have  met  here 
more  than  I  can  tell  you,  but  late  at  night, 
sometimes,  alone  in  my  always  monotonously 
perfect  bedroom,  when  all  through  the  house 
not  a  creature  is  stirring,  not  even  a — valet, 
I  often  giggle  at  the  abysmal  difference  be 
tween  us.  And  in  spite  of  all  their  hospitality 
and  millions,  the  laugh,  I  must  colloquially 
confess,  is  on  them.  For  although  I  am  per 
fectly  capable  of  meeting  them  on  their  ground, 
they  could  not  possibly  meet  me  on  mine. 
From  earliest  childhood  our  influences  and 
training  have  been  as  far  apart  as  the  poles, 
but  I  consider  mine  by  far  the  more  important 
and  valuable;  for,  when  I  feel  like  it,  I  can 
go  into  society,  while  they  have  no  idea  at 
140 


JUST    A   LETTER 

all  of  the  relief  and  delight  of  getting  out 
of  it.  They  know  their  own  side  of  life,  but 
I  am  perfectly  conversant  with  theirs  and  sev 
eral  others  as  well.  When  I  am  with  them 
I  can  do  all  of  their  stunts  just  as  well  as  they 
do  them  themselves,  but  I  know,  somewhere 
in  the  back  of  my  head,  that  they  couldn't  do 
any  of  mine.  I  don't  despise  them  or  look 
down  on  them  for  this,  but  I  do,  every  now 
and  then,  feel  awfully  sorry  for  them — regret 
for  them  the  things  they  have  missed  and  are 
missing.  "  Just  what  does  he  mean  by  that?  " 
I  think  I  can  see  you  wonder. 

Well,  I  mean  all  sorts  of  things,  and  for 
the  most  part  they  are,  no  doubt,  absurd  and 
incommunicable.  I  mean,  for  instance,  that 
I  know  all  about  their  fussy,  tedious,  proper, 
little  childhoods,  and  that  they  do  not  know, 
and  never  will  know,  anything  about  mine. 
In  my  opinion,  their  childhood  was  a  decorous 
tragedy ;  in  their  opinion,  if  they  learned  about 
it,  mine  would  be  a  sensational  scandal.  In 
New  York  it  always  gives  me  a  queer,  asphyxi 
ated  feeling  when  I  see  pretty,  expensively 
141 


PREJUDICES 

dressed  little  boys  walking  for  exercise  on  up 
per  Fifth  avenue  in  charge  of  a  maid  or  a 
footman,  or  being  transported  in  an  automo 
bile  or  a  victoria  for  an  hour's  "  romp  "  in 
the  park.  And  here  at  Newport  I  have  over 
heard  little  girls  discussing  with  acuteness  and 
authority  the  probable  length  of  time  it  would 
take  the  lady  who  has  rented  the  palace  next 
door  to  arrive  at  the  goal  of  her  social  am 
bitions. 

My  own  childhood  was  so  wonderfully 
casual  and  different!  We  lived  on  the  out 
skirts  of  a  small  northwestern  city — not  in  the 
country  exactly,  and  not  exactly  in  the  slums. 
In  those  days  the  place  had  no  slums,  but  it 
had  outlying,  semi-rural  tracts  where  poor 
people  built  shanties  and  "  squatted."  My  par 
ents  neither  built  a  shanty  nor  squatted,  but 
they  built  a  house  that  from  time  to  time  grew 
and  rambled,  and  they  lived  there.  They  were 
able  to  live  where  they  pleased,  because  in  the 
community  they  were  persons  of  importance. 
I,  however,  was  not,  and  as  children,  especially 
boys,  always  play  with  the  most  available  other 
142 


JUST    A    LETTER 

children,  unless  they  are  told  not  to  (and  even 
then  sometimes),  and  as  I  was  never  told  not 
to,  my  only  boy  companions  and  intimate 
friends,  until  I  was  fourteen,  were  the  boys  of 
our  neighborhood.  At  that  time  they  were 
known  to  the  elite  as  "  the  Elm  street  gang." 
The  ungraded  road  on  which  our  house  was 
situated  had  been  named,  with  the  usual  sub 
tlety  of  municipal  authorities,  "  Elm  Street," 
because  all  of  its  trees  were  either  scrub  oak 
or  maple.  They  were  "  the  Elm  street  gang  " 
in  those  days;  to-day  they  would  merely  be 
known  as  "  muckers."  It  was  with  them  that 
all  my  early  years  were  spent,  both  in  school 
and  out.  For  at  that  time,  if  I  remember 
rightly,  the  parochial  schools  (all  my  friends 
were  Irish  Roman  Catholics)  did  not  catch 
their  pupils  as  young  as  they  do  now,  and  we 
all  went  to  a  yellow  brick  schoolhouse  named 
after  a  Democratic  president. 

To  you  it  may  not  seem  to  be  a  matter  of 

importance  that  until  I  was  fourteen  my  only 

playmates    and    dearest    friends    were    Irish 

muckers.     To  me  it  is  of  a  significance  that 

143 


PREJUDICES 

I  could  scarcely  explain.  For  at  an  impres 
sionable  age  I  not  only  lived  my  own  life — 
the  life  I  was  born  to  — in  my  own  house  and 
family,  but  quite  as  naturally  and  sincerely  I 
lived  the  life  of  an  Irish  mucker.  (This,  to  me, 
sounds  like  an  unappreciative,  a  clumsy,  al 
most  a  brutal  way  of  stating  it,  but  if  I  ex 
pressed  it  otherwise  you  probably  wouldn't  un 
derstand.)  I  knew  their  families  and  loved 
them.  I  used  to  share  not  only  their  meals 
when  I  felt  like  it  (they  always  tasted  much 
better  than  our  own),  but  their  sorrows  and 
their  joys.  Elm  street  and  vicinity  in  those 
clays  was  a  little  segment  lifted  in  its  entirety 
from  the  bogs  of  Ireland  and  set  down  in  the 
Northwest,  and,  as  I  lived  there,  I  very  early 
in  life  became  intimate  with  poverty,  drunken 
ness  and  death.  Before  I  was  twelve  I  had  sat 
in  a  whitewashed  room  with  a  drowned  boy, 
discussing  with  his  family  what  they  could 
most  advantageously  sell  or  pawn  in  order  to 
pay  for  the  expense  of  a  funeral.  And,  oh !  the 
wakes.  We  had  wakes  on  Elm  street;  real 
ones;  the  kind  that  nowadays  take  place  only 
144 


JUST    A    LETTER 

in  Irish  fiction.  And  I  used  to  go  to  them  be 
cause  they  were  the  wakes  of  persons  I  had 
known,  and,  in  a  childish  way,  cared  for. 
After  twenty-four  years  I  can  still  recall  the 
final  expression  of  certain  pallid,  waxen  faces, 
and  white,  crossed,  emaciated  hands.  They 
used  to  "  keen,''  just  as  they  do,  no  doubt,  in 
some  parts  of  Ireland  to-day,  and  it  was  Mrs. 
Smith  who  always  started  it.  To  you  "  Mrs. 
Smith  "  may  sound  somewhat  vague,  but  there 
was  only  one  Mrs.  Smith  at  that  time.  She 
was  a  supernaturally  old  woman,  who  always 
wore  a  kind  of  semi-sunbonnet  of  frilled  white 
linen  and  devoted  most  of  her  time  to  a  flock 
of  geese.  Through  her  the  torch,  so  to  speak, 
had  been  handed  down.  After  her  death  there 
was  no  more  keening. 

But,  of  course,  it  wasn't  all  wakes.  On 
Sunday  morning  I  used  to  go  up  to  the 
Hogans  where  Mame  was  preparing  dinner 
while  the  rest  of  the  family  were  at  mass.  At 
that  time  I  looked  upon  Mame  as  grown  up, 
even  old;  but  she  couldn't  have  been  more 
than  sixteen.  The  Hogans  had  a  wonderful 

145 


PREJUDICES 

vegetable  garden,  and  while  the  family  was 
at  church,  Mame  and  I  would  pull  up  carrots 
and  beets,  pick  peas  and  beans,  gather  ears  of 
corn,  snip  off  sprigs  of  parsley,  prepare  them 
all,  and  then  dump  them  into  a  rotund  iron  pot 
on  the  stove  with  a  chunk  of  meat.  After  that 
we  would  sit  down  outside  of  the  shanty  and 
talk.  I  forget  now  what  we  talked  about,  but 
it  must  have  been  absorbing  to  me,  because  I 
was  always  still  there  when  Mrs.  Hogan 
creaked  up  the  hill  in  her  Sunday  black,  and 
I  usually  stayed  for  the  soup.  Never  in  this 
world  will  soup  again  taste  like  that. 

I  knew  these  people  intimately,  and  in  a 
queer  sort  of  way  felt  that  I  was  one  of  them. 
The  opulent  and  well-dressed  boys  of  the  place 
always  avoided  Elm  street.  They  were  des 
perately  afraid  of  the  locality,  and  with  reason. 
For  there  was  a  perpetual  rumor  abroad  that 
the  elm  street  gang  hated  the  "  Yanks," — as 
the  nicely  dressed,  male  offspring  of  the  fash 
ionable  districts  were  called  by  us.  As  I  look 
back  on  it  all  I  think  we  did  hate  them — I, 
almost  as  heartily  as  the  rest.  Then  arrived  the 
146 


JUST    A    LETTER 

inevitable  time  when  I  acquired  a  bicycle,  and 
the  "  Yanks  "  (I  can't  imagine  why)  invited 
me  to  become  a  member  of  their  bicycle  club. 
I  accepted,  and  from  that  time  on  I  was  "  in 
society."  But  I  shall  never  forget  the  first 
meeting  of  the  bicycle  club  in  front  of  our 
house  when  my  old  friends  gathered  to  see  the 
start,  and  I  felt  like  a  renegade,  a  sneak  and 
a  traitor.  Even  now  I  can  remember  some 
of  the  scathing  and  picturesquely  blasphemous 
comments  made  on  that  occasion  by  the  gang. 

My  old  friends  have  never  forgotten  me 
and  I  have  never  forgotten  them.  Some  of 
them  are  far  from  being  desirable  citizens,  and 
spend  much  of  their  time  in  the  workhouse. 
Others  of  them  have  become  part  of  the  valu 
able  thing  we  call  "  the  backbone  of  the  na 
tion."  In  this  they  all  do  not  differ  very 
widely  from  some  of  my  acquaintances  more 
recently  acquired,  except  that  whereas  the 
former  are  in  the  workhouse,  the  latter  merely 
ought  to  be. 

But  I  don't  see  why  I  should  be  bombard 
ing  you  with  these  reminiscences.  Perhaps, 


PREJUDICES 

after  all,  you  won't  see  what  they  always  mean 
to  me,  and  particularly  here,  in  this  wondrously 
unreal  environment,  where  the  "  other  half  " 
is  something  one  merely  subscribes  to,  or  oc 
casionally  reads  about  in  a  magazine.  But, 
you  see,  I  know  the  other  half;  at  one  period 
of  my  life  I  actually  was  the  other  half.  And 
when  I  confess  to  my  skinny  old  dinner  com 
panion  that  I  don't  like  truffles  and  loathe 
champagne,  I  have  the  most  irrelevant  visions. 
They  make  a  snob  of  me,  these  visions;  not  a 
snob  in  the  general  acceptation  of  the  term,  but 
a  snob,  none  the  less.  For  I  continually  feel 
that  I  know  more  about  life  than  these  people 
know,  or  ever  will  know.  It  is  a  source  of  sat 
isfaction  that  I  can  see  all  around  them  while 
they  are  able  to  see  only  the  particular  front  I, 
for  the  moment,  wish  to  display.  If  I  could 
choose  between  millions  and  my  memories  of 
Elm  street,  I  think  I  should  cling  to  Elm  street. 

***** 
That,   practically,   was  .the   letter.      It   was 
pleasant  in  spots.     I  have  tried,  as  I  said,  to 
extract  some  of  the  spots. 
148 


IN   THE   UNDERTAKER'S 
SHOP 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

SOME  time  ago  I  went  down  town  to  buy 
a  coffin.     No,  I  didn't  say  that  to  be 
startling;    it    is   merely   a   bald,   literal 
statement  of  fact.     Now  and  then  one  goes 
down  town  to  buy  a  book,  or  a  pair  of  gloves, 
or  some  postage  stamps.     On  this  occasion  I 
went  to  buy  a  coffin. 

The  conventional  idea  of  grief  is  that  it  is 
an  exclusive  emotion ;  that  it  leaves  no  room  in 
the  mind,  for  the  time  being,  for  any  other. 
Like  most  of  our  beliefs,  and  most  of  them 
are  erroneous,  we  have  derived  this  one  from 
books  and  newspapers.  "  Mrs.  So-and-so  bore 
up  bravely  to  the  end,  but  is  now  under  the 
care  of  a  physician,  and  is  completely  prostrated 
by  grief,"  one  almost  always  reads  in  a  news 
paper  account  of  the  last  hours  of  that  alto 
gether  estimable  citizen,  her  husband.  And 
she  sincerely  believes  this — believes  it  even 
11  151 


PREJUDICES 

while  she  stands  in  front  of  the  glass,  telling 
the  young  woman  from  the  dry-goods  shop 
that  the  veil  hasn't  been  pinned  on  straight 
and  that  the  skirt  is  at  least  three  inches  too 
long  in  the  back.  There  is  no  hypocrisy  here ; 
she  does  feel  acutely  and  deeply  bereaved.  But 
she  is  by  no  means  completely  prostrated,  and 
there  is  plenty  of  place  in  her  intelligence  for  a 
variety  of  sensations  that  have  little  or  nothing 
to  do  with  her  sorrow.  In  fact,  physicians 
tell  me  that  persons  in  ordinary  "  good  health  " 
are  very  rarely  prostrated  by  grief ;  that  when 
they  are,  complete  prostration,  on  the  part  of 
gentlemen,  is  generally  traceable  to  too  many 
drinks  of  whisky,  and  on  the  part  of  ladies, 
to  the  morphine  pill  of  the  family  doctor. 

Some  persons  are  so  constituted  that  even  in 
the  case  of  their  own  trouble  they  can  appre 
ciate  this ;  other  persons  can't.  I  happen  to  be 
one  of  the  kind  who  can,  so  when  I  went  into 
the  undertaker's  shop,  it  was,  after  the  first 
rather  dreadful  moment,  easy  and  natural  for 
me  to  regard  the  place  and  what  I  saw  and 
heard  there  impersonally  and  with  interest. 

152 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

This  was  the  less  difficult,  perhaps,  from  the 
fact  that  for  several  minutes  I  was  alone,  there 
was  no  one  to  attend  to  me  and  I  had  time  to 
sit  down  and  look  about  me — to  collect  my 
self  and  begin  to  wonder  why  the  person  whose 
establishment  it  was,  was  called  an  "  under 
taker,"  in  the  first  place.  It  is  really  a  comic, 
a  grotesque  word,  whether  it  means  that  the 
man  to  whom  it  applies  merely  "  undertakes  " 
in  a  general  sense,  or  more  specifically,  under 
takes  to  take  one  under.  I  decided  to  look  this 
matter  up  in  a  dictionary  when  I  went  home, 
but  I  neglected  to,  of  course,  and  it  is  still 
one  of  those  philological  mysteries  through 
which  we  write  and  speak  and  have  our  being. 
I  had  time  also  to  discover  just  why  these 
places,  quite  aside  from  their  associations,  are 
in  themselves  always  so  hideous,  so  offensive, 
so  utterly  repellent.  It  is  simply  because  they 
express  in  terms  of  furniture  the  characteris 
tics  and  point  of  view  of  the  always  very  un 
pleasant  persons  who  conduct  them.  A  being 
from  another  planet  ought  to  be  able  to  re 
construct  an  American  undertaker  merely  by 

153 


PREJUDICES 

examining  the  furniture  of  the  front  room  in 
which  he  transacts  his  business. 

The  locale  of  other  trades  and  professions 
usually  expresses  some  one  thing,  and  nothing 
else.  The  offices  of  lawyers,  stockbrokers  and 
architects,  for  instance,  suggest  only  the  law, 
finance  and  construction.  There  is  about  them 
an  intelligible  directness,  an  admirable  single 
ness  of  purpose.  You  know  just  where  you 
are,  and  they  admit  of  no  emotional  intricacies 
between  you  and  the  men  you  consult  there. 
An  undertaker's  office,  on  the  other  hand,  is  a 
piece  of  elaborate  hypocrisy.  It  deprecatingly 
shrinks  from  admitting  that  it  is  one  thing  or 
the  other.  Over  one  of  the  most  rapacious 
trades  in  all  this  sad  world  it  seeks  to  draw  a 
veil  of  domesticity  and  religion.  One  is  repelled 
by  the  place  because  it  is  so  deliberately  false. 

In  it  there  is  always  the  apparatus  of  busi 
ness — telephones  and  a  roll-top  desk  full  of 
billheads  and  ledgers  and  writing  materials. 
That  corner  of  the  room  is  practical  to  a  de 
gree.  But  there  are  always,  as  well,  several 
rocking-chairs  with  "  tidies,"  half  a  dozen 
154 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

dreary  palms  and  ferns,  a  few  pictures  of  a 
semi-devotional  nature  in  somber  frames,  and, 
if  it  can  possibly  be  managed,  an  imitation 
stained-glass  window.  The  rocking-chairs,  the 
tidies,  the  dusty  green  things,  the  pictures,  the 
colored  glass  are  there  to  "  soften  the  blow," 
to  extend  a  kind  of  mute  sympathy,  to  make 
you  feel  that  your  relations  with  the  place  are 
not  entirely  sordid  and  commercial.  On  a 
table  there  is  literature,  but  lest  it  should  strike 
in  one's  affliction  a  false  and  jarring  note,  it 
is  invariably  confined  to  last  year's  reports, 
bound  in  dark-gray  paper,  of  the  trustees  of 
local  cemeteries.  To  one's  intelligence  it  is  all 
very  insulting. 

So,  also,  was  the  manner  of  the  abhorrent 
young  man  who  presently  appeared  through  a 
curtained  doorway  in  the  rear  of  the  particular 
establishment  I  happened  to  be  visiting.  In  the 
room  beyond  he  had  been  whistling,  as  he 
approached,  a  popular  two-step,  but  he  in 
stantly  ceased  when  he  saw  me  and  uncon 
sciously  drawing  his  face  into  a  wan,  smitten 
smile,  came  forward  noiselessly,  almost  on  tip- 

155 


PREJUDICES 

toe.  He  would  have  shaken  hands  with  a  slight, 
prolonged  pressure  full  of  regret  and  compre 
hension  if  I  had  let  him,  but  I  saw  it  coming 
and  putting  my  hand  in  my  pocket  allowed 
his  to  drop  back  with  a  sad  gesture  that  sought 
to  say:  "Yes — yes,  I  understand." 

"  I  should  like  to  look  at  coffins,"  I  re 
marked,  and  then  coldly  eyed  his  discomfiture. 
For  it  was  clearly  not  the  sort  of  beginning  he 
had  expected.  I  had  been  prosaic  and  un 
moved,  and  the  fact  left  him  for  a  moment 
with  his  trained  sympathy,  his  professional 
manner,  on  his  hands  so  to  speak.  He  didn't 
exactly  know  what  to  do  with  it,  and  he 
couldn't  quite  bring  himself,  all  at  once,  to 
risk  anything  else.  In  the  meantime  I  merely 
looked  at  him. 

"Mr.  Murksom  "  (Mr.  Murksom  was  the 
proprietor;  they  always  have  names  like  that) 
"  has  stepped  out  for  a  few  minutes,  but  he's 
coming  right  back,"  the  young  man  at  last  ex 
plained  in  tones  that  tried  t,o  be  commonplace 
like  my  own.  But  I  could  see  how  difficult  it 
was  for  him  to  be  commonplace  under  the  cir- 

156 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

cumstances.  Separated  from  its  traditional 
and  odious  technique,  the  pursuit  of  his  voca 
tion  plainly  seemed  to  him  neither  legitimate 
nor  altogether  decent.  "  Mr.  Murksom  is  very 
helpful,"  he  added  in  a  refined  whisper,  deli 
cately  averting  his  eyes.  He  had  relapsed 
again  into  the  "  manner  " ;  he  just  couldn't 
help  it.  It  was  as  if  he  had  said :  "  Even  if 
for  some  perverse  reason  you  refuse  to  act 
your  part,  it  will  never  be  said  of  me  that  I 
have  failed  in  mine." 

"  Won't  you — rest,"  he  then  suggested,  in 
dicating  one  of  the  rocking-chairs ;  and  I  real 
ized,  with  an  all  but  uncontrollable  desire  to 
laugh  aloud,  that  the  slight  hesitation  followed 
by  the  mortuary  word  "  rest,"  was  his  tribute 
to  my  presumable  and  complete  prostration.  I 
took  possession  of  the  rocking-chair,  but  he 
sat  down  on  an  angular  piece  of  "  mission  " 
work,  with  a  straight  back,  and  then  brought 
the  tips  of  his  fingers  together  in  a  fashion 
that  positively  murmured,  but  without  the 
crudity  of  words :  "  The  Lord  giveth,  and  the 
Lord  taketh  away." 

157 


PREJUDICES 

"  Will  you  have  a  cigarette?"  I  brutally 
inquired,  for  I  was  about  to  smoke  one  my 
self.  And  this,  I  saw  with  relief,  for  the  time 
being,  definitely  broke  the  spell.  With  a  cigar 
ette  in  his  mouth,  or  between  his  fingers,  it 
was  impossible,  even  for  him,  to  produce  any 
of  his  effects.  He  gave  up  trying  to,  and  we 
talked.  Among  other  things,  I  asked  him, 
while  I  waited  for  the  return  of  Mr.  Murksom, 
how  he  had  come  to  choose  his  occupation.  All 
my  life  I  had  wanted  to  ask  an  undertaker  that, 
but  I  never  before  had  been  given  so  good  an 
opening.  His  reply  was  interesting,  as,  in 
deed,  I  knew  it  would  be,  or  I  shouldn't  have 
asked  the  question. 

"  I  didn't  exactly  choose  it,"  he  replied.  "  I 
don't  think  anybody  ever  does.  It  isn't  the 
kind  of  a  job  a  person  really  chooses.  I  just 
drifted  into  it,  little  by  little.  That's  what  they 
all  do,  I  think.  I  had  a  friend  who  used  to 
drive  the  wagon,  and  sometimes  when  he  had 
to  go  very  far,  I'd  go  along  with  him  to  keep 
him  company  and  hold  the  horses  while  he  was 
inside.  You  get  to  talking,  sometimes,  and 
158 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

when  you  talk  about  things  you  kind  of  get 
used  to  them.  After  awhile  they  seem  natural. 
Sometimes,  when  my  friend  had  things  to  do 
here  at  the  office,  I  used  to  help  him;  you 
might  just  as  well,  as  to  sit  around  doing 
nothing.  And  then  someone  offers  you  a  job, 
"and  as  you  know  a  good  deal  about  it  by  that 
time,  and  don't  mind,  you  take  it.  You  kind 
of  get  into  it  by  degrees." 

Just  here  Mr.  Murksom  appeared,  and  I  saw 
at  a  glance  that  beneath  his  spurious  melan 
choly  one  might  never  penetrate.  He  had  been 
at  it  for  too  many  years.  The  professional 
manner,  thick  and  unctuous,  enveloped  him. 
He  couldn't  have  abandoned  it  had  he  wanted 
to.  It  clung  to  him,  I  was  sure,  at  the  lightest 
moments  of  his  life.  Of  course,  it  was  impos 
sible  to  imagine  his  life  as  having  any  light 
moments,  but  assuming  that  such  a  thing  could 
be,  I  felt  that  gayety  with  him  would  vaguely 
approximate  only  the  gayety  of  a  flag  at  half- 
mast.  He  would  have  approached  the  back 
platform  of  a  street  car  in  precisely  the  same 
soundless,  sympathetic,  discreetly  afflicted  way 

159 


PREJUDICES 

in  which  he  approached  a  sobbing  widow.  It 
was  the  way,  moreover,  in  which  he  at  once 
approached  me.  I  had  craftily  evaded  the 
hand  of  his  assistant,  but  there  was  no  escap 
ing  the  condoling  pressure  of  Mr.  Murksom. 
It  had  sought  my  own  and  gently,  lugubriously 
squeezed  it  before  I  had  been  able  to  take  de 
fensive  measures,  and  it  did  not,  although  I 
tried  to  drop  it,  immediately  relax.  In  fact, 
it  held  on,  and,  with  a  kind  of  ghoulish  author 
ity,  led  me  across  the  room  and  through  the 
curtained  doorway  in  the  rear.  The  creature 
had  divined  everything;  he  knew  exactly  why 
I  had  come  long  before  I  had  arrived  to  tell 
him.  As  I  was  drawn  into  the  inner  room 
I  recalled  the  phrase  "  hand  in  glove,"  and  it 
occurred  to  me  that  Mr.  Murksom  was  quite 
unavoidably  the  glove  upon  the  hand  of  God. 
I  heard  him  sigh  most  convincingly  on  two 
notes,  and  although  he  didn't  say  anything 
continuous  or  even  very  coherent,  I  seemed  to 
catch  the  words  "  very  sad,"  and  "  always  a 
shock,  even  when  expected." 

Once  beyond  the  curtained  doorway,  I  dis- 
160 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

engaged  myself  and  again  declared  that  I 
wished  to  look  at  coffins;  but  the  manner  in 
which  Mr.  Murksom,  from  then  on,  combined 
the  shrewd  salesman  with  the  spiritual  consoler 
is  something  my  feeble  pen  altogether  balks  at 
recording.  As  far  as  I  could  see,  there  were 
no  coffins  in  the  room  in  which  I  had  expected 
to  find  an  embarrassment  of  choice,  but,  rest 
ing  a  protecting  palm  upon  my  shoulder  as 
if  to  shield  me  from  a  sudden  shock,  Mr. 
Murksom  pressed  a  button  in  the  room's  white 
paneling,  and  lo!  a  natty  three  hundred  and 
fifty-dollar  receptacle  turned  a  sort  of  somer 
sault  and  landed,  so  to  speak,  at  our  feet.  It 
was  exactly  like  opening,  or  letting  down,  the 
upper  berth  in  a  sleeping  car,  except  that  these 
berths  were  on  end  instead  of  on  -their  sides. 
Before  I  had  made  up  my  mind,  we  had 
pressed  buttons  and  lowered  upper  berths  all 
around  three  sides  of  the  room. 

"  Now,  just  what  is  the  difference  between 
this  one,  which  costs  two  hundred,  and  that 
one,  which  is  only  ninety-eight?"  I  inquired, 
for  to  me  they  both  looked  very  much  alike. 
161 


PREJUDICES 

'  This  one,"  Mr.  Murksom  replied,  and  I 
could  see  he  thought  me  a  haggling,  heartless 
person,  "  is  something  more — more  permanent. 
That  one  won't — well,  that  one  is,  as  one 
might  say,  less  able  to  withstand  the — the  in 
evitable  conditions.  Personally,"  he,  to  my 
surprise,  hastened  to  add,  "  I  don't  wish  for 
anything  too  permanent.  '  Dust  to  dust,'  you 
know,"  he  murmured,  as  he  pressed  another 
button.  This,  I  confess,  surprised  me  very 
much,  for  it  seemed  to  me  that  anyone  who, 
for  years  and  years,  had  buried  several  persons 
a  day  would  necessarily  fall  into  the  habit  of 
considering  himself  immortal.  For  a  moment 
I  thought  of  drawing  him  out  on  the  subject ; 
it  occurred  to  me  that  a  man  whose  whole  life 
consisted  of  death  ought  to  have  made  some 
illuminating  reflections.  Indeed,  after  I  finally 
accomplished  what  I  had  come  for,  I  did  begin 
to  ask  a  question,  but  was  interrupted  in  the 
middle  of  it.  For  the  young  man  suddenly  ap 
peared  in  the  curtained  doorway  with  some 
thing  wrapped  in  brown  paper  and  tied  with  a 
pink  string.  He  was  not  exactly  excited,  he 
162 


IN    THE    UNDERTAKER'S    SHOP 

never  could  have  been  that,  but  he  was,  at 
least,  natural.  After  our  little  conversation,  I 
think  he  had  concluded  that  there  wasn't  much 
point  in  keeping  it  up  any  longer  with  me. 
This,  at  any  rate,  is  the  only  way  in  which  I 
could  account  for  his  ignoring  my  presence  to 
the  extent  of  making,  in  a  moment,  a  most 
extraordinary  and  startling  announcement.  He 
held  the  brown  paper  parcel  toward  Mr.  Murk- 
som,  who  had  turned  inquiringly  toward  him, 
and  then  exclaimed,  with  a  pleased  smile : 

"  They've  found  those  legs." 

"  Ah,"  sighed  Mr.  Murksom,  "  and  where 
were  they?  " 

"  In  the  wagon  all  the  time.  The  horses 
just  walked  away  from  the  house  and  a  police 
man  stopped  them  as  they  were  trying  to  get 
into  a  vacant  lot  to  eat  grass.  Well,"  he  ended, 
in  a  gratified  tone,  "  I'm  glad  they  found  those 
legs." 

At  this,  I  somewhat  hurriedly  said  good 
afternoon,  and  withdrew.  They  were  very 
little  legs.  I  read  about  them  in  the  paper  the 
next  day. 


WRITERS 


WRITERS 

I  CAN  never  decide  which  is  the  more  an 
noying  to  a  writer :  to  have  people  elabor 
ately  ignore  the  fact  that  he  writes  and 
has  written,  or  to  have  them  assume  that  he 
can't  talk  about,  and  isn't  interested  in,  any 
thing  but  books  in  general  and  his  own  in  par 
ticular.  The  happy  medium  is  conversation 
ally  discovered  by  only  a  very  few,  but  this 
no  doubt  is  the  case  with  almost  all  happy 
mediums.  It  isn't  in  the  least  disconcerting  to 
meet  a  person  who  is  quite  unaware  of  the 
fact  that  you  are  the  clever  Mr.  Snooks,  author 
of  "  The  Swill  Barrel :  A  Story  of  To-day." 
Indeed,  when  your  new  acquaintance  has  not 
even  heard  of  either  you  or  your  latest  work, 
you  may  be*  able  to  have  with  him  a  perfectly 
rational  and  agreeable  conversation.  But  there 
is  a  type  of  person  who  has  read  "  The  Swill 
12  167 


PREJUDICES 

Barrel  "  with  interest,  who  knows  you  wrote 
it,  and  who  for  some  cryptic  reason  never  al 
ludes  to  it  or  betrays  the  fact  that  he  realizes 
you  are  the  clever  Mr.  Snooks.  This  is  really 
most  trying.  You  knowr  that  he  knows;  he 
knows  that  you  know  that  he  knows,  and  you 
both  somewhat  consciously  talk  about  other 
things — he,  because  of  an  utterly  misguided 
idea  that  it  is  "  in  better  taste  "  not  to  speak 
of  a  book  to  its  author,  and  you,  because,  under 
the  circumstances,  you  would  rather  die  than 
admit  you  recognized  a  pen  when  you  saw  it 
reposing  on  a  desk. 

To  refrain  from  speaking  to  a  writer  of  his 
books  because  you  think  it  in  better  taste  not 
to,  because  "  he  must  be  so  tired  of  having 
people  talk  to  him  about  that  book,"  is  to  dis 
play  a  not  particularly  keen  or  sympathetic  un 
derstanding  of  human  nature.  A  writer, 
whether  he  be  a  novelist,  a  historian,  a  writer 
of  essays,  a  writer  of  editorials,  a  poet,  a  re 
porter,  a  message  indicting  President  of  the 
United  States,  or  the  secretary  of  a  charitable 
organization,  invariably  hopes  that  what  he 
1 68 


WRITERS 

writes  will  be  read;  that  it  will  please,  amuse, 
instruct,  inform,  divert, — that,  in  a  word,  it 
will  interest  somebody,  or  rather,  a  group  of 
somebodies.  With  many  writers  the  commer 
cial  aspect  of  the  transaction  is,  of  course,  al 
ways  prominent,  but  their  commercial  success 
depends,  after  all,  upon  their  ability  to  charm. 
Once  having  grasped  the  pen  and  set  out  to  do 
any  of  these  things,  it  is  only  human  and 
natural  to  be  gratified  on  learning  that  you 
have  succeeded,  and  if  the  people  you  from 
time  to  time  meet  don't  tell  you  that  you  have, 
you  remain  in  dreadful  doubt.  To  the  ears 
of  a  writer  no  music  on  earth  is  sweeter  than 
intelligent  praise,  and  even  praise  that  is  not 
intelligent  is  sweet  if  it  has  the  ring  of  sincer 
ity.  I  remember  once  taking  in  to  dinner  a 
young  girl  who  assured  me  that  she  had  very 
much  enjoyed  a  certain  story  of  mine  because 
it  had  made  her  "  cry  and  cry  and  cry."  Most 
insincerely,  as  I  knew  which  story  it  must  have 
been,  I  asked  her  the  name  of  it.  She  there 
upon  adorably  declared  that  she  didn't  remem 
ber  the  name,  she  couldn't  recall  where  she 
169 


PREJUDICES 

had  come  across  it,  and  she  had  forgotten  what 
it  was  about,  but  she  had  "  cried  and  cried  and 
cried." 

Occasionally  writers  have  assured  me  that  it 
bored  them  to  receive  enthusiastic  letters  about 
their  books,  and  I  have  at  once,  mentally,  re 
plied  "  You're  a  liar."  No  writer  is  ever  any 
thing  but  pleased  to  learn  that  some  one  has 
found  something,  anything,  of  interest  or  value 
in  one  of  his  efforts.  One  may  write  primarily 
for  money,  to  make  a  living,  but  no  matter  to 
what  trashy  and  flashy  depths  a  writer  may 
descend,  there  is  always  in  his  books  some 
thing  of  himself.  However  hard  he  might  try, 
he  could  not  keep  it  out,  and  it  immensely 
pleases  him  to  have  it  discovered  and  com 
mented  upon,  either  in  a  letter  from  an  un 
known  reader  or  in  a  five  minutes'  conversa 
tion.  To  me  few  incidents  are  as  agreeable, 
as  altogether  gratifying  and  satisfactory,  as  is 
the  incident  of  opening  an  envelope  addressed 
in  an  unknown  handwriting  and  finding  in 
side  a  letter  that  begins,  "  I  have  never  written 
to  an  author  before,  but  I  feel  that  I  must  write 
170 


WRITERS 

to  tell  you  that,"  etc.,  etc.  And  any  one  who 
has  written  a  book  and  declares  that  letters 
like  this  do  not  please  him,  is  simply  a  poseur 
or  untruthful,  or  both. 

In  the  case  of  the  great  and  famous  it  no 
doubt  now  and  then  ceases  to  be  a  pleasure. 
A  daughter  of  Longfellow  told  me  that  her 
father  had  once  received  an  imperative  note 
from  some  woman,  worded  about  as  follows : 
"  Dear  Sir :  I  have  issued  invitations  for  a 
ladies'  luncheon  a  week  from  next  Wednesday. 
There  will  be  about  fifty  present  and  I  wish 
to  present  each  of  them  with  your  autograph 
as  a  souvenir.  Kindly  send  me  at  once 
fifty  autographs  to  the  address  given  below." 
Longfellow  was  the  kindest  and  most  courte 
ous  of  men,  but  this  was  a  little  more  than 
even  he  could  "  stand  for,"  as  we  would  ex 
press  it  to-day.  The  luncheon  was  unauto- 
graphic. 

On  the  other  hand,  many  persons  not  only 

do  not  ignore  the  fact  that  a  writer  is  a  writer, 

they  have  an  inexplicable  habit  of  regarding 

him  and  his  books  as  a  kind  of  legitimate  prey. 

171 


PREJUDICES 

When  they  hear  they  are  going  to  meet  him 
at  some  gathering  they  make  a  point  of  re 
freshing  their  memories  on  the  subject  of  his 
various  volumes,  if  they  have  read  them  be 
fore,  or  endeavor  to  skim  through  one  or  two 
if  they  have  not  already  made  their  acquaint 
ance.  They  then  have  a  comfortable  feeling 
that  their  conversational  equipment  is  com 
plete,  and  they  relentlessly  talk  to  the  poor 
wretch  about  nothing  but  his  works.  They 
ask  him  how  he  came  to  think  of  certain  char 
acters,  if  they  were  drawn  from  life,  how  long 
it  takes  him  to  write  a  novel,  has  he  any  regu 
lar  hours  for  working  or  does  he  wait  for  an 
"  inspiration,"  how  much  does  he  get  for  a 
short  story  in  such  and  such  a  magazine,  has 
his  latest  book  been  selling  well,  doesn't  he 
find  writing  a  delightful,  a  fascinating  occu 
pation,  what  is  he  writing  now,  when  will  it 
be  finished,  who  is  going  to  publish  it,  and 
does  he  get  a  lump  sum  for  it  or  a  royalty  on 
every  copy?  I  don't  exaggerate;  in  fact,  I 
have  omitted  a  long  list  of  searching  and  per 
sonal  questions  to  which  a  writer  is  constantly 
172 


WRITERS 

subjected.  The  ordinary  attitude  toward  a 
person  who  makes  his  living  by  grinding  out 
books  has  always  been  to  me  an  inexplicable 
one.  Nobody  with  the  smallest  grain  of  sense 
or  tact  is  ever  impelled  to  cross-question  a 
lawyer  about  his  cases  in  court  or  a  doctor 
about  his  cases  in  the  hospital.  The  thing  is 
almost  inconceivable,  and  when  it  does  very  oc 
casionally  happen,  the  thoughtless  interlocutor 
is  very  properly  snubbed.  One  would  experi 
ence  a  certain  delicacy  in  asking  even  a  tailor 
about  the  various  garments  he  was  cutting  and 
sewing,  but  comparatively  few  persons  have 
scruples  against  putting  a  writer  through  the 
third  degree.  To  me  this  has  always  been  re 
markable,  because  I  realize  that  in  almost  every 
lawsuit,  however  trivial,  and  in  almost  every 
case  of  illness,  there  is  more  emotion,  more  hope 
and  fear,  more  ingenuity,  more  drama,  more 
"  human  interest,"  than  in  all  the  novels  and 
stories  put  together.  And  yet  lawyers  and 
doctors  and  tailors  and  real  estate  men  seem 
to  escape,  while  writers  are  everywhere  lashed 
to  the  interrogatory  mast. 

173 


PREJUDICES 

It  also  has  always  seemed  strange  that  a 
man  or  woman  who  writes  books,  however 
thin  and  lacking  in  importance,  is  invariably 
given,  wherever  he  goes,  a  luncheon,  a  dinner, 
or  that  altogether  horrible  form  of  human  in 
tercourse  known  as  a  "  tea."  Other  men  and 
women  who  from  every  point  of  view  have 
made  a  success  of  their  lives  can  enter  a  town, 
stay  for  two  weeks  and  depart  without  being 
noticed.  But  when  Richard  Thyng  Snooks 
(author  of  "The  Swill  Barrel :  A  Story  of  To 
day,"  a  very  poor  story  I  beg  to  assert)  ar 
rives,  innumerable  festivities  are  arranged  in 
his  honor.  He  is  asked  to  luncheon  and  dinner, 
it  is  hoped  that  he  can  be  prevailed  upon  to 
"  say  something,"  anything,  at  some  entertain 
ment  during  his  all  too  brief  stay.  The  local 
branch  of  the  Federated  Women's  Clubs  in 
variably  tries  to  lasso  him,  and  is  terribly  dis 
appointed  if  it  doesn't  succeed.  Knowing 
many  writers  of  books,  as  by  accident  I  happen 
to,  this  is  something  I  have  never  been  able  to 
comprehend. 

Personally,  my  feeling  toward  my  various 

174 


WRITERS 

scribbling  friends  is  that  I  like  them,  not  be 
cause  they  write,  but  in  spite  of  it.  We  meet 
and  gossip  about  a  thousand  things,  but  I  can 
scarcely  remember  talking  with  any  of  them 
on  the  subject  of  writing.  It  is  only  with 
the  kind  of  person  who  looks  upon  a  printed 
and  launched  book  as  a  sort  of  achievement 
(which  of  course  it  isn't)  that  one  talks  about 
the  making  of  books.  Men  and  women  who 
write,  I  have  learned,  are  usually  grateful 
when  they  can  temporarily  be  made  to  forget 
about  it. 

It  is  conventional  to  think  of  writers  as  ec 
centric  creatures  who  live  apart  in  a  world  of 
their  own.  I  have  known  many,  but  I  have 
not  found  this  to  be  the  fact.  As  a  rule  I  have 
discovered  that  the  anecdotes  about  them  have 
been  built  upon  the  most  slender  foundations, 
either  by  well-meaning  admirers  who  imagined 
for  them  an  interesting  atmosphere  of  which 
they  themselves  were  guiltless,  or  by  malicious 
gossips  who  hoped  to  do  them  harm.  The 
things  printed  about  writers  in  newspapers  are 
usually  half  truths  ingeniously  distorted,  or 

175 


PREJUDICES 

absolute  falsehoods.  The  actual  peculiarities 
of  writers,  the  little  prejudices  and  habits  and 
superstitions  they  almost  all  have  to  a  greater 
"or  less  degree,  rarely  find  their  way  into  type, 
because  they  are  so  rarely  spoken  of.  One 
knows,  of  course,  that  Fenelon  was  able  to 
wrrite  in  comfort  only  when  dressed  in  court 
costume,  with  fine,  clean  lace  falling  over  his 
slender,  aristocratic  hands;  that  Balzac,  in  the 
agonies  of  composition,  consumed  quarts  of 
strong  coffee  and  wore  a  kind  of  monastic 
dressing  gown ;  that  Dickens  always  had  upon 
his  desk,  wherever  he  went,  a  little  collection 
of  valueless  ornaments  he  was  used  to  seeing 
there,  and  without  which  he  felt  ill  at  ease  and 
unable  to  begin  his  task ;  that  Thackeray  usually 
hated  to  write  and,  as  a  rule,  dragged  himself 
to  his  pen  and  ink  with  extreme  repugnance; 
that  Schiller  kept  in  the  drawer  of  his  writing 
table  half  a  dozen  rotten  apples,  the  smell  of 
which  he  inhaled  deeply  before  he  was  able  to 
compose.  Such  instances,  and  hundreds  of 
others,  are  authentic  and  historic.  They  have 
become  known  because  the  writers  who  were 

176 


WRITERS 

responsible  for  them  are  famous  the  world 
over,  and  nothing  in  their  lives  seems  to  be  too 
insignificant  to  be  ferreted  out  and  proclaimed. 
It  is  interesting  to  know  that  lesser  scribes 
are  everywhere,  in  all  sincerity,  the  victims  of 
much  the  same  whims  and  unaccountable,  in 
nocent  manias.  A  talented  and  successful 
woman  novelist  of  my  acquaintance  once  con 
fided  in  me  that  she  never  felt  like  writing  un 
less  her  hands  were  dirty.  In  winter,  before 
sitting  down  to  write,  she  always  dusts  a  room, 
a  shelf  of  books,  or  builds  a  fire.  In  summer 
she  spends  half  an  hour  or  so  pulling  up  weeds 
in  the  garden.  Her  hands  are  then  dirty  and 
comfortable,  and  she  can  write  with  compara 
tive  enjoyment.  A  man  I  know,  however,  al 
ways  scrubs  his  hands  with  hot  water  and  soap 
before  beginning  to  write,  and  then  squirts  a 
drop  or  two  of  cologne  on  them.  This  sounds 
as  if  he  wrote  highly  romantic  fiction  or  lack 
adaisical  poetry.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  his  sub 
jects  are  history  and  political  economy,  and  he 
is  regarded  as  an  authority  upon  those  serious 
matters.  But  these  are  queer,  intensely  per- 
177 


PREJUDICES 

sonal  little  traits'that  emerge  diffidently,  almost 
reluctantly,  only  when  one  knows  a  writer  very 
well  indeed.  They  are  not  the  sort  of  stuff 
that  finds  its  way  into  the  newspapers. 

My  experience  with  writers  may  not  be  con 
clusive,  but  it  seems  to  have  dawned  on   me 
that,  the  more  important  a  writer  is,  the  more 
stable  and  justified  his  place  is  in  the  world 
of  letters,  the  less  eager  he  is  to  chatter  about 
his  profession.    It  is  the  person  who  has  more 
or  less  accidentally  had  one  story  accepted  by 
Scribner's,  Harpers'  or  the  Century,  or  the 
contributor  to  some  third-rate  sectional  mag 
azine,  who  insists  upon  talking  of  his  "  work," 
who  is  forever  hinting  of  the  conspiracy  among 
editors  and  publishers  to  reject  anything  un 
signed  by  a  well-known  name.     Real  writers 
usually  go  about  their  business  calmly,  method 
ically  and  with  little  or  no  enthusiasm.     It  is 
rarely  writing  that  they  find  "  delightful  and 
fascinating  "  ;  it  is  the  having  written.     Those 
I  have  known  intimately  have  without  excep 
tion  admitted  that  they  could  always  re-read 
with  interest  certain  passages  from  their  own 


WRITERS 

books  when  other  diversions  fai'^c'  them,  and 
while  they  often  were  conscious  of  opportu 
nities  lost,  of  having  gone  astray,  of  having 
failed  to  achieve  the  effect  at  which  they  aimed, 
they  on  the  other  hand  were  more  than  com 
pensated  by  the  discovery  of  certain  phrases, 
paragraphs  and  whole  pages  they  had  almost 
forgotten  and  that  struck  them  as  being  sur 
prisingly  skilful. 

One  hears  much  of  the  long,  discouraging 
struggle  for  acceptance  and  recognition  waged 
by  young  authors,  how  their  manuscripts  are 
returned  unread  by  the  editors  of  great  mag 
azines  because  their  names  are  unknown,  and 
so  on.  Having  been  a  reader  on  a  magazine 
myself,  I  listen  to  such  tales  with  an  exceed 
ingly  skeptical  ear.  In  the  United  States,  at 
least,  it  is  much  more  difficult  to  keep  out  of 
print  than  to  get  into  it.  Editors  and  pub 
lishers  read,  or  have  their  readers  read,  with 
the  most  painstaking  care,  absolutely  every 
thing  submitted  to  them.  Not  to  do  so  would 
be  fatal;  it  would  incur  the  risk  of  missing 
something,  of  failing  to  make  the  occasional 
179 


PREJUDICES 

big  killing.    Being  human,  they  naturally  make 
mistakes  they  bitterly  regret;  and  it  seems  to 
me  that  this  usually  happens  when  the  manu 
scripts  sent  in  have  about  them  a  touch  of 
genius.     Genius  is  always  somewhat  ahead  of 
its  time,  and  publishers  are  invariably  a  little 
afraid  of  it.     They  have  toward  it  much  the 
same  attitude  that  a  nice  old  lady  might  have 
toward  an  invitation  from  Wilbur  Wright  to 
take  a  spin  with  him  in  his  flying  machine. 
They   prefer  something   more   reliable,   more 
within  their  experience.     It  is  said  that  Kip 
ling's  "  Plain  Tales  "  made  the  rounds  of  all 
our  magazines  and  publishing  houses  before 
they  found  any  one  sufficiently  daring  to  print 
them.     They  were  "  different,"  both  in  matter 
and  in  manner;  they  were  not  of  the  old  re 
liable,  tried  and  true  variety;  they  had  about 
them  something  very  like  genius.    But  it  seems 
incredible    that   anyone    nowadays,    who   can 
borrow  a  respectable  plot  and  unfold  it  in  a 
style  sufficiently  lacking  in  originality,  should 
be  denied   admittance   to  the  magazines   and 
the  publishers'  catalogues.     I  don't  believe  it. 
1 80 


WRITERS 

And  at  present  the  field  appears  to  offer  un 
usual  opportunities,  for  not  long  ago  Laura 
Jean  Libbey  decided  (at  least  so  I  read  in  a 
New  York  paper)  "  to  lay  down  her  tired  pen 
and  give  other  women  writers  a  chance."  Miss 
Libbey  is  furthermore  said  to  have  declared 
to  the  reporter  who  interviewed  her  on  her  re 
tirement  from  the  active  world  of  letters,  that 
in  looking  back  upon  her  busy  career  she  had 
but  one  regret;  she  sometimes  feared  that  the 
name  of  one  of  her  books  was  too  long.  When 
asked  which  one  it  could  have  been,  she  replied 
that  it  was  the  novel  entitled,  "  You  Would 
Not  Have  Blamed  Her  for  Going  Wrong,  if 
You  Had  Known  What  the  Conditions  Were 
at  Home." 


"ANN   VERONICA" 


is 


"ANN    VERONICA  " 

ABOUT  an  hour  ago  I  finished  reading 
the  latest  novel  of  Mr.  H.  G.  W^ls. 
I  laid  it  aside  and  since  then  I  have 
been  thinking  about  it.  During  the  past  month 
a  great  many  other  persons  apparently  have 
been  doing  precisely  the  same  thing.  For 
whatever  may  be  one's  verdict  on  the  novels  of 
Mr.  Wells,  and  the  verdicts  are  absorbingly 
different,  it  cannot  be  said  that  these  volumes 
do  not  incite  one  to  think.  The  ordinary  Amer 
ican  and  English  novel  does  not.  It  may  be, 
and  often  is,  skilful  and  diverting;  it  holds 
the  attention  and  ft  passes  the  time,"  but  on 
finishing  it  one  immediately  begins  to  think 
of  something  else.  It  almost  never  seems  to 
be  the  cause  of  the  slightest  kind  of  mental  re 
sult.  Personally,  I  cannot,  for  instance,  con 
ceive  of  one's  reading  a  book  by  Mrs. 

185 


PREJUDICES 

Humphry  Ward,  Robert  Chambers,  Richard 
Harding  Davis,  Hamlin  Garland,  Robert 
Hichens,  not  to  mention  hundreds  of  others, 
and  having,  subsequently,  any  kind  of  mental 
reaction.  They  all  without  doubt  write  more 
or  less  well,  amuse  a  great  many  people  for  a 
few  hours,  and  incidentally  make  a  good  and 
honest  living.  But  there  it  all  ends.  They  are 
trained  performers,  and  entirely  justified  be 
cause  they  are  so  well  trained.  They  do  things 
we  are  all  accustomed  to  having  well  done  and 
they  do  them  better  than  most.  Almost  in 
variably  I  applaud  the  industrious  Mrs.  Ward 
when  she  produces  still  another  work  of  fiction ; 
it  is  usually  so  neat,  so  competent,  so  adequate, 
so  professional.  She  once  wrote  with  not 
much  skill  an  important  book,  "  Robert  Els- 
mere,"  and  since  then  she  has  made  an 
enormous  income  by  writing  with  extreme 
skill  books  of  no  importance  whatever.  To 
ward  the  ordinary  "  good  "  writer  of  contem 
porary  novels  I  confess  that  I  feel  very  much 
as  one  feels  at  the  theater  devoted  to  vaude 
ville,  when  a  lady  hops  along  an  almost  in- 
186 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

visible  wire  on  one  leg,  or  a  gentleman  grace 
fully  promenades  about  the  stage  on  his  hands 
or  his  head.  It  is  all  rather  difficult  to  do;  it 
has  taken  time  and  training;  it  is  diverting 
to  watch  and  it  is  well  paid  for.  But  when  the 
curtain  descends  one  begins  to  think  about  the 
performing  seals  or  the  ventriloquist  who  is 
advertised  to  appear  next.  As  soon  as  the  act 
is  over,  it  is  over.  There  is  nothing  to  reflect 
upon,  to  take  home  with  one,  so  to  speak.  I 
should  dislike  to  give  the  impression  that  for 
this  reason  I  depreciate  the  act  or  "  look 
down  "  on  it.  Such  is  not  the  case.  I  merely 
beg,  superfluously,  perhaps,  to  state,  that  it  has 
its  place  in  the  world,  fulfills  its  little  destiny, 
and  that  its  destiny  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  progress,  or  even  the  activity,  of  human 
thought. 

The  novels  of  Mr.  Wells,  on  the  other  hand, 
are  quite  different.  I  am  not  going  to  review 
them,  criticise  or  appraise  them.  That  has 
been  done,  and  will  be  done,  by  far  more  able 
pens  than  mine.  I  simply  have  an  irresistible 
desire  to  record  that  whatever  one  thinks  about 


PREJUDICES 

them  they  are,  after  all,  first  and  last,  novels 
about  which  it  is  impossible  not  to  think.  This 
seems  to  me  to  be  a  great  deal  at  the  outset.  I 
am  unable  to  recall  more  than  three  other  Eng 
lish-writing  novelists  of  the  present  day  who 
inspire  me  with  the  same  sensations.  To  sit 
for  awhile  and  reflect  on  this  volume  leads  me 
far  away  from  it  into  a  tortuous  maze  of 
thought  about  all  kinds  of  things — about  life, 
about  art,  about  literary  style  in  general,  and 
then  about  certain  specific  aspects  and  corners 
and  byways,  disputed  boundaries  and  quaking 
bogs  of  these  subjects,  in  particular.  The  book 
has  been  discussed  in  my  presence  by  several 
persons,  all  of  whom  are  unusually  intelligent, 
and  I  think  my  only  reason  for  mentioning  it 
is  because  it  got  these  good  minds  started,  got 
them  going  with,  to  me,  distinctly  interesting 
results.  The  discussions  shed  a  light  and  also 
erected  a  perfect  barricade  of  question  marks 
at  the  end  of  every  path  I  have,  in  considering 
the  matter,  attempted  to  tread. 

The  story,   like   the   stories  of   most   great 
writers  (and  it  gives  me  pleasure  to  be  able  to 
188 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

say  that  I  happen  to  consider  Mr.  Wells  a  great 
writer),  is  exceedingly  simple.  The  unup- 
holstered  skeleton  of  it  is  this :  A  young  Eng 
lish  girl  of  an  upper-middle-class  family  lives 
with  her  father  and  her  aunt  in  a  pleasant, 
comfortable  London  suburb.  The  tempera 
ments,  ideas  and  activities  of  the  father  and 
the  aunt  are  absolutely  mid-Victorian.  The 
girl,  however,  has  inhaled  the  atmosphere  of 
the  twentieth  century.  She  has  gone  to  lec 
tures  at  a  college  and  studied  biology;  in  an 
immature  fashion  she  inevitably  belongs  to  a 
world  entirely  different  from  that  of  her  esti 
mable  and  tedious  father,  from  that  of  her  re 
fined  and  intellectually  unawakened  aunt.  One 
evening  she  wishes  to  go  to  a  fancy-dress 
party  with  some  artistic  friends  of  hers  who 
live  in  the  same  suburb.  Her  father,  with  his 
vague,  natural  and  perfectly  comprehensible 
horror  of  anything  "  artistic,"  forbids  her  to 
go,  makes  it,  in  fact,  impossible  to  go;  where 
upon  the  daughter,  revolting  from  her  shel 
tered,  commonplace,  mentally  stultifying  do 
mesticity,  leaves  the  paternal  hearth  and  under- 
189 


PREJUDICES 

takes  to  lead  a  life  of  her  own  in  London.  The 
rest  of  the  story  has  to  do  with  the  develop 
ment  of  the  mind  and  soul  of  the  girl  who  is 
both  essentially  feminine  and  essentially  mod 
ern. 

Of  course  I  was  intensely  interested  in  the 
comments  to  which  I  have  referred,  not  so 
much  because  they  threw  light  on  the  book  (the 
book  speaks  for  itself),  but  because  of  the  light 
they  threw  on  the  persons  who  made  them  and 
the  questions  they  evoked. 

"  Yes,  I  read  the  book  and  I  consider  it  ob 
jectionable  from  almost  every  point  of  view," 
declared  Smith. 

"  What  you  really  mean  is  that  you  consider 
it  objectionable  from  every  point  of  view 
which  you  are  by  temperament  and  education 
capable  of  taking,"  replied  Jones.  "  There  are 
other  points  of  view  in  the  world;  no  one  per 
son  is  able  to  possess  them  all.  I,  for  instance, 
do  not  consider  the  book  objectionable  in  any 
way.  It  strikes  me  as  being  a  theme,  or  rather 
several  themes,  of  vital  interest  treated  by  a 
master  in  a  masterly  fashion." 
190 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

"  But  I  cannot  feel  that  such  themes  are 
legitimate  in  a  work  of  fiction — a  work  of  art," 
protested  Smith ;  "  especially,"  he  went  on, 
"  when  they  are  treated  so  mercilessly — with 
so  much — so  much " 

"  So  much  truth,"  Jones  interposed  in  a  tone 
of  superiority  and  triumph.  "  You  will  have 
to  admit,  I  am  sure,  that  there  isn't  a  false  note 
in  the  whole  story ;  it  has  the  ring  of  relentless 
truth  from  the  first  page  to  the  last.  Do  you 
mean  to  say  that  you  shrink  from  the  truth — 
that  you  don't  prefer  truth  always  to  prevail  ?  " 

Smith  squirmed  a  trifle,  but  held  his  ground. 
"  I  am  not  at  all  sure  that,  in  a  work  of  fiction 
(and  a  work  of  fiction  should  be  a  work  of 
art),  absolute  truth  should  be  sought  for.  I 
see  the  difference  between  art  and  science. 
Why  should  one  endeavor  to  be  the  other?" 
he  inquired. 

"  But  a  novel  purports  to  be  a  picture  of 
life." 

"  Yes,  exactly — a  picture ;  and  a  picture 
isn't  life  itself;  it  is,  or  ought  to  be,  after  all, 
a  picture,"  said  Smith,  momentarily  trium- 
191 


PREJUDICES 

phant  in  turn.  "  The  human  body,  for  instance, 
has  been  painted  and  sculptured  from  the  be 
ginning  of  civilization,  and,  indeed,  before  it, 
but  even  to-day,  with  all  our  modern  passion 
for  fact  or  verity  or  whatever  you  choose  to 
call  it,  even  the  most  realistic  of  sculptors  and 
painters  has  a  tendency  to  grope  toward  beauty 
of  form,  to  portray  human  beings  without 
clothes  more  as  they  ought  to  look  rather  than 
as  they  actually  do.  This,  it  seems  to  me,  is 
the  wonderful  privilege  and  function  of  art. 
It  should  embellish  life,  not  perpetuate  its  ugli 
ness.  Toward  the  writing  of  novels  I  feel 
much  the  same.  There  are  entire  sides  of  life 
that  do  not  strike  me  as  a  proper  field  of  ex 
ploitation  in  a  tale,  a  narrative,  a  novel." 

"  But  what  is  a  poor,  unhappy  man  of  talent 
to  do?"  exclaimed  Jones.  "Here  Is  Wells. 
He  has  observed  with  microscopic  fidelity  a 
young  girl  whose  character,  habit  of  thought, 
conception  of  life,  her  attitude  toward  the  en 
tire  universe,  in  short,  has  developed  and  been 
formed  in  an  epoch  grotesquely  different  from 
that  in  which  her  father  and  aunt  received  their 
192 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

indelible  impressions.  The  result  is  a  domes 
tic  tragedy.  It  interested  Wells;  he  sees  all 
around  it;  it  strikes  him  as  being  of  immense 
value  in  the  history  of  human  shift  and 
change ;  he  wants  to  record  it ;  he  does  so  with 
the  marvelous  vividness  and  truthfulness  of 
which  he  almost  alone  is  at  present  master, 
and  then  you  go  and  call  him  offensive  and 
objectionable  and  a  lot  of  other  things.  What 
do  you  want  a  man  like  that  to  do?  Ought 
he  to  observe  and  reflect  merely  for  his  own 
instruction,  and  then  when  he  puts  pen  to 
paper,  perpetrate  a  new  series  of  the  '  Elsie 
Books  '  or  '  Dottie  Dimple  '  ?  " 

"  Now,  of  course,  you  have  become  extreme 
and  unfair,"  objected  Smith.  "  I  need  hardly 
say  that  even  during  my  earliest  years  I 
couldn't  endure  the  *  Dottie  Dimple '  and 
'  Elsie '  tendencies  of  fiction.  Besides,  you 
know  perfectly  well  the  sort  of  books  I  enjoy. 
You  know  that,  strangely  enough,  I  revel  in 
both  Thackeray  and  Dickens.  I  have  read 
'  Middlemarch  '  six  times  and  hope  to  read  it 
many  times  more.  I  can  always  re-read  the 

193 


PREJUDICES 

Brontes  and  Mrs.  Gaskell  and  Meredith  and 
Hardy.  Howells  has  rarely  failed  me.  Henry 
James  used  to  charm  and  enchant  me  and  he 
still  always  interests  me  even  when  I  have  to 
work  hard  to  translate  him.  But  what's  the 
use  of  naming  any  others?  The  list  is  suffi 
ciently  comprehensive  to  show  that  I  am  not 
narrow-minded." 

"  The  list  is  admirable  as  far  as  it  goes," 
Jones  agreed ;  "  I  have  but  one  fault  to  find 
with  it,  which  is  that  you  have  read  this  and 
several  other  books  by  Wells  with  interest,  and 
yet  you  will  not  accept  him  and  enroll  his 
name.  The  man  is  important  in  the  world  of 
letters;  if  he  were  not,  you  and  I  could  not 
possibly  spend  so  much  time  in  talking  about 
him.  Tacitly  you  admit  this.  Why  do  you 
refuse  to  admit  it  positively?  It  makes  me 
feel  that  you  are  not  quite  keeping  in  step  with 
your  epoch,  your  age,  your  time,  your  period. 
This  is  a  marvelous  age,  and  aren't  you  rather 
deliberately  falling  behind  it?  By  the  way, 
where  does  Balzac  come  in?  You  haven't 
mentioned  Balzac." 

194 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

"  I  have  read  nearly  everything  of  Balzac 
with  sincere  interest,"  Smith  admitted.  "  He 
is  a  literary  wonder,  a  giant;  sometimes  he 
seems  to  me  to  be  a  kind  of  intellectual  mon 
ster." 

'  Yet  Balzac  was  anything  but  squeamish 
in  his  choice  of  subject  or  his  fashion  of  treat 
ing  it.  He,  too,  had  his  microscope.  He 
stuck  the  end  of  it  in  his  eye  and  looked  at 
life  and  wrote  accounts  of  his  investigations. 
Surely  they  cannot  always  have  pleased  you !  " 

"  No,  they  don't.  And  here,  you  may  laugh 
if  you  want  to,  but  I  can't  help  confessing  that 
I  have  entirely  different  feelings  when  I  read 
awful  things  about  French  people.  It  is  no 
doubt  illogical,  absurd,  anything  you  please; 
but  somehow  I  can't  be  upset  and  disgusted 
by  the  turpitude  of  a  hero  named,  for  ex 
ample,  '  Lucien  de  Rubempre,'  as  I  should  be 
if  he  did  the  same  things  and  his  name  was 
Peter  Jackson." 

"  How    splendidly    limited    you    are ! "    re 
flected  Jones.     "It  does  not  occur  to  you  that 
human  life  is  human  life;  that  the  fact  of  its 
195 


PREJUDICES 

being  English  or  French,  American  or  Nor 
wegian,  is  a  mere  accident.  In  the  end  it  is  al 
ways  just  the  same.  You  can,  in  a  word,  en 
dure  the  naked  truth  about  persons  who  are 
not  of  your  own  nationality  and  whose  lan 
guage  is  not  very  familiar  to  you,  but  you 
hate  to  have  the  truth  told  about  your  neigh 
bors  and  acquaintances  and  friends.  You  hate 
to  have  a  writer  of  English  tackle  either  the 
fundamental  questions  of  existence,  or  any 
of  the  ugly,  gross,  squalid,  frightful,  real  as 
pects  that  can  be  found  without  any  trouble 
whatever  in  every  well-regulated  family." 

"  George  Eliot  tackled  a  tragic  and  ugly  in 
cident  in  'Adam  Bede,'  but  I  think  'Adam 
Bede '  is  a  great  and  beautiful  book,"  de 
clared  Smith.  "  You  see,  it  isn't  altogether  a 
question  of  subject ;  it  is  largely  a  question  of 
treatment." 

"  How  differently  Wells  would  have  treated 
'  Adam  Bede  ' !  "  mused  the  other. 

"  Yes,  and  in  my  opinion  he  would  have 
ruined  it,"  Smith  hastened  to  add.  "  George 
Eliot  wrote  with  a  pen ;  Wells  writes  with  a 
196 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

clinical  thermometer  and  a  stethoscope.  I  may 
be  behind  the  times,  but  I  prefer  novels  to  be 
written  with  a  pen.  In  the  long  run  I  firmly 
believe  that  for  the  purposes  of  literature  the 
pen  is  mightier  than  the  surgical  instrument.'' 

"  That  may  be,"  conceded  Jones  with  re 
luctance,  "  but  why  not  keep  one's  mind  open 
to  every  sincere  and  interesting  experiment  in 
the  world  of  letters  or  the  world  of  anything 
else?  And  there  can  be  no  question  at  all  of 
Wells's  sincerity.  With  a  most  extraordinary 
intellectual  equipment  and  gift  for  expression 
through  the  medium  of  words,  he  has  under 
taken  in  his  novels  to  examine  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  mind  and  heart  and  soul ;  to  strip  them 
of  every  vestige  of  their  conventional  gar 
ments  and  to  display  them  quivering,  real, 
naked.  It  is  not  only  an  attempt  entirely  new 
in  English  fiction,  which  in  itself  attracts  my 
literary  attention;  it  is,  in  the  case  of  Wells, 
a  successful  attempt  which  both  attracts  my 
attention  and  firmly  holds  it." 

"  But  I  hate  and  detest  and  loathe  '  quiv 
ering  '  souls  and  minds  and  hearts  running 
197 


PREJUDICES 

around  loose  in  fiction,"  Smith  almost  shrieked. 
"  I  don't  wish  to  encounter  them  there ;  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  I  don't  wish  to  encounter  them 
anywhere.  Sometimes  on  the  journey  through 
life  one  has  to;  the  meeting  is  unavoidable,  but 
I  declare  and  protest  that  I  have  never  sought 
an  introduction  to  them.  I  don't  want  them 
to  be  thrust  upon  me,  ever." 

At  this  point  Mrs.  Robinson  suddenly  tossed 
aside  the  doily  she  had  been  all  along  crochet 
ing  in  receptive  silence,  and  exclaimed: 

"  I've  read  the  book  you  two  helpless  and 
rather  ridiculous  men  have  been  trying  to  dis 
cuss,  and  I  think  you  have  both  missed  the 
entire  point  of  it.  You've  been  chattering  and 
gabbling  about  art  and  literature  and  morality 
but  you  haven't  touched  at  all  on  what  is  the 
backbone  of  the  book.  I've  been  listening  to 
you,  and  you  both  express  yourselves  with 
conviction  and  some  force ;  but  both  of  you 
have  missed  the  point."  Mrs.  Robinson  smiled 
at  us  wisely  and  maternally,  including  me,  al 
though  I  had  kept  out  of  the  discussion.  She 
is  a  woman  of  sixty-five.  She  has  known  the 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

world,  she  has  lived  and  she  has  thought,  and 
on  the  subject  of  "  Ann  Veronica  "  she  spoke 
as  follows : 

"  I  read  the  book.  It  of  course  interested 
me;  if  it  hadn't  I  should  not  have  finished  it. 
Now  listen,  Mr.  Smith  and  Mr.  Jones,  to  an 
old  woman  and  try  to  realize  where  she  rises 
intellectually  above  you  both.  To  Mr.  Smith 
the  book  is  out  of  the  question,  impossible.  To 
Mr.  Jones  it  is  an  important,  perhaps  a  great 
study  of  certain  phases  of  contemporary  life. 
Neither  of  you  will  concede  an  inch,  and 
neither  of  you  seem  to  be  aware  of  the  fact 
that  the  interest  of  the  book  does  not  consist 
in  its  frankness  of  phrase,  in  its  matter-of-fact 
acceptance  of  unconventionality.  What  the 
story  crystallizes,  in  a  fashion  that  will  make 
the  average  middle-aged  parent  sit  up  and 
gasp,  is  the  tragic  impossibility  of  a  parent 
comprehending  and  sympathizing  with  its  own 
offspring.  As  you  know,  I  have  long  been  a 
mother  of  grown-up  children,  and  my  family 
is  remarkably  '  united,'  as  the  saying  is ;  but 
if  you  take  your  courage  in  your  hands,  open 
14  199 


PREJUDICES 

wide  your  eyes  and  honestly,  pitilessly  ex 
amine  aJmost  any  family  however  theoretically, 
technically  '  united/  what  do  you  discover?  I 
am  not  talking  of  the  idealist  and  the  senti 
mentalist.  I  am  referring  to  cool  and  calm  in 
vestigators  like,  let  us  say,  this  man  Wells  you 
both  have  been  talking  about.  He  has  exam 
ined  a  certain  family.  It  is  just  one  small 
family,  but  the  writer  has  succeeded  to  an 
astonishing  degree  in  typifying  the  modern 
family  in  general,  although  to  admit  that  he 
has  may  be  repellent. 

"  The  world,"  declared  Mrs.  Robinson,  "  is 
moving  with  a  rather  frightening,  breath-tak 
ing  rapidity.  Even  parents,  comparatively 
young,  no  longer  live  the  lives  of  their  chil 
dren.  I'm  not  such  an  old  fool  as  to  believe 
for  a  moment  that  I  know  what  my  boys  are 
doing  or  what  my  girls  are  thinking.  I  used 
to  consider  it  possible;  I  now  am  convinced 
that  it  is  impossible.  Such  character  as  I  have 
developed  and  solidified,  I  achieved  under  cir 
cumstances  that  do  not  now  obtain,  although 
J  tried,  wrongly  perhaps,  to  keep  them  up,  to 
200 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

prolong  them  and  make  them  influences  in  the 
lives  of  the  beings  for  whom  I  am  responsible. 
My  greatest  claim  to  modernity  consists  in  the 
fact  that  I  have  gracefully  recognized  and  ac 
cepted  defeat.  My  children  are  my  children, 
but  they  also  are  children  of  a  period  in  the 
world's  history  to  which  I  really  do  not  in  a 
heartfelt  way  belong.  This  in  many  respects 
is  sad,  it  is  even  at  times  horrible.  But  here 
we  are !  What  are  we  going  to  do  about  it  ? 
Ann  Veronica  belonged  violently  to  her  time. 
Her  father  belonged  tenaciously  to  his.  To 
preserve  a  united  family,  what,  given  these 
conditions,  must  happen  ?  Simply  concessions. 
To  preserve  the  happy  family,  Ann  must  al 
ways  forfeit  some  of  her  intelligence  and  mod 
ernity  ;  Papa  and  Mamma  must  always  concede 
to — oh,  all  sorts  of  little  things  (sometimes 
they  are  dreadfully  big  things)  that  they 
abominate.  Parents  and  children  have  to  scare 
up  a  kind  of  domestic  philosophy  and  meet  one 
another  half  way.  When  they  don't  there  is 
no  longer  a  '  united  '  family.  There  is  a  drama 
of  some  sort  and  Mr.  Wells  sits  down  and 
201 


PREJUDICES 

writes  a  story  about  it.  Ann  was  the  kind  of 
offspring  who  would  not  concede.  Her  father 
was  the  kind  of  parent  who  would  not  concede. 
You  have  seen  what  happened.  I  am  not  so 
sure  that  Mr.  Wells  himself  is  aware  of  what 
is  really  the  lesson  of  his  novel,  but  it  is  that 
sixty  rarely  has  sympathy  with  and  genuine 
understanding  of  twenty,  and  twenty  in  its 
heart  of  hearts  looks  upon  sixty,  not  as  perhaps 
experienced  and  wise,  but  as  rather  absurd. 
Concessions!  All  life  is  an  endless  succession 
of  them.  If  we  didn't  at  every  moment  make 
them,  everybody  in  the  world  would  have  to 
live  in  absolute  solitude,  and  even  then  he 
would  have  to  concede  to  the  forces  of  nature, 
the  sun  and  the  rain,  the  cold  and  the  dark, 
hunger,  weariness  and  sleep. 

"  Now  stop  this  wrangling,  Mr.  Smith  and 
Mr.  Jones,"  the  good  lady  went  on,  "  and  both 
concede  a  little.  You,  Mr.  Smith,  must  con 
cede  that  the  book  is  interesting  and  written 
with  a  skill,  a  gift  for  observation  and  expres 
sion  possessed  by  few,  although  I  shall  allow 
you  to  retain  your  temperamental  bias  and  con- 
202 


"ANN    VERONICA" 

sider  the  story  uncalled  for  and  the  treatment 
coarse. 

"  You,  Mr.  Jones,  must  concede  that  this* 
manner  of  writing,  of  depicting  life,  is  an  in 
novation  in  English;  that  although  you  enjoy 
it,  it  may  not  be  a  wise  one;  that  instead  of 
merely  amusing  and  doing  good  it  may  have 
the  power  to  do  harm,  and  that  Mr.  Smith  is 
entitled  to  his  opinion  even  if  it  doesn't  coin 
cide  with  yours.  There  is  much  to  be  said  in 
favor  of  Mr.  Smith's  opinion." 

"  And  what  is  your  opinion,  Mrs.  Robin 
son  ?  "  I  at  this  point  inquired. 

"  Oh,  I  haven't  any,"  she  replied  gayly.  "A 
really  wise  old  woman  never  has." 


HOLIDAYS 


HOLIDAYS 

WITH  me,  at  least,  holidays  finally 
became  an  issue  that  had  to  be 
met,  faced  and,  once  and  for  all, 
disposed  of.  For  years  I  half-consciously  post 
poned  the  matter  and  went  through  many  of 
the  motions  supposed  to  be  essential  to  their 
respective  spirits.  On  the  Fourth  of  July,  for 
instance,  I  would  try  to  feel  noisily  inclined 
and  patriotic,  although  my  patriotism  is  not  of 
a  blatant  variety  and  I  had  begun  to  dread 
noise  almost  more  than  I  dreaded  any  other 
ill  to  which  the  human  flesh  is  heir.  On  Christ 
mas  I  endeavored,  in  the  most  painstaking 
fashion,  to  scare  up  a  good-will-to-everybody 
sensation  that  I  didn't  sincerely  possess.  On 
Thanksgiving  Day  I  tried  to  observe  the  con 
vention,  not  of  giving  thanks,  for  that  has 
never  become  a  convention,  but  of  pretending 
207 


PREJUDICES 

that  I  desired  more  than  usual  to  eat,  which 
I  never  did  and  never  do.  But,  all  the  while, 
firecrackers  were  becoming  more  and  more  ab 
horrent,  geniality  around  the  Yule  log  more 
of  a  bore,  the  sight  of  excessive  food  more  re 
pulsive,  and,  finally,  I  began  to  realize  what 
was  happening  to  me.  Quite  simply  and  nat 
urally  and  inevitably,  darling  "  was  growing 
old;  silver  threads  among  the  gold,"  and  not 
only  silver  threads  (they  are  the  least  of  it) 
but  a  lot  of  other  things  were  taking  place.  It 
is  all  very  interesting,  and  one  of  the  most  in 
teresting  things  about  it  is  the  incredibly  short 
time  in  which  it  seems  to  happen.  Perhaps 
my  memory  is  extremely  erratic ;  in  fact  I  feel 
sure  it  is,  for  sometimes  last  week  is  almost  a 
total  blank,  whereas  twenty  and  occasionally 
even  thirty  (dear  Heaven!)  years  ago  are 
vivid,  clear-cut  and  intelligible.  The  more 
ancient  date  often  seems  more  real  and  alive 
than  the  later.  I  haven't  the  vaguest  idea  of 
what  I  did  last  Tuesday.  There  undoubtedly 
was  a  last  Tuesday,  but  now,  as  far  as  I  am 
concerned,  it  did  not  exist,  although  I  am 
208 


HOLIDAYS 

reasonably  sure  that  while  it  ticked  itself  away 
I  was  clothed  and  in  my  right  mind.  On  the 
other  hand,  I  can  most  accurately  recall,  for 
example,  the  early  morning  of  the  Fourth  of 
July,  1884.  How  we  "  conspired  at  every 
pore  " !  I  remember  going  to  bed  most  re 
spectably  and  innocently  at  the  usual  time, 
waiting  until  the  more  mature  members  of  the 
family  were  sound  asleep  and  then  sneaking 
down  to  the  drawing-room  and  dozing  rest 
lessly  on  a  sofa  until  about  half-past  two  A.  M. 
At  that  weird  and  ecstatic  hour  we  emerged 
from  a  French  window,  extricated  our  fire 
crackers  from  the  little  "  dog-house  "  in  which 
we  had  secreted  them  and  proceeded  to  make 
the  rest  of  the  night  altogether  odious.  It 
comes  back  to  me  that  an  accidental  spark 
popped  into  the  ammunition  box  and,  with  a 
heart-rending,  rip-snorting  crash,  flash  and 
agonized  detonation,  destroyed  everything  in 
about  one  and  a  half  tragic  minutes.  It  was 
astonishing  and  glorious  while  it  lasted,  but  it 
lasted  such  a  short  time  that  the  rest  of  the 
night  would  have  been  left,  so  to  speak,  on 
209 


PREJUDICES 

our  hands,  if  someone  had  not  reluctantly  tip 
toed  to  his  house  and  produced  the  supply  he 
had  been  hoarding  for  the  daylight  hours. 
Then,  with  a  huge  bonfire,  we  all  but  ruined 
a  beautiful  elm  tree,  set  fire  to  the  fence, 
burned  great  chasms  in  the  wooden  side 
walk  and  had  a  perfectly  delightful  time 
generally. 

I  refer  to  these  ordinary  activities  of  the 
American  male  child  only  because  I  feel  as  if 
I  had  been  engaging  in  them  yesterday  morn 
ing  instead  of  twenty-five  years  ago,  and  be 
cause,  in  spite  of  my  photographic  recollection, 
so  many  queer  things  have  taken  place.  To 
begin  with,  wrhereas  I  still,  in  memory,  am 
able  to  reexperience  the  exquisite  thrill  I  had 
when,  at  the  age  of  thirteen,  I  would  hold  a 
giant  firecracker  in  my  hand  until  the  last  ad 
visable  fraction  of  a  second,  1  now  have  a 
horror  of  giant  firecrackers,  or  indeed  of  any 
thing  that  noisily  explodes  with  possible  dire 
results.  In  Mexico,  for  instance,  when  my 
brother  and  I  are  making,  on  mule  back,  a 
journey  in  an  isolated  part  of  the  country,  he 
210 


HOLIDAYS 

always  insists  on  my  carrying  a  revolver  in 
a  large,  visible  holster.  Mexicans  have  a  most 
erroneous  idea  that  with  a  revolver  all  Ameri 
cans  have  an  accurate  and  deadly  aim.  My 
brother  considers  this  a  great  moral  support 
and  declares  that  the  idea  ought  to  be  en 
couraged.  Well,  I  carry  the  revolver,  but  I 
don't  mind  confessing  that  I  am  much  more 
afraid  of  it  than  I  am  of  anything  else  in 
Mexico.  The  dangerous  implement  keeps 
bumping  against  my  hip,  reminding  me  that 
it  is  there  and  that  it  might  tear  six  large  holes 
in  me  at  any  moment.  It  is  always  an  im 
mense  relief  to  arrive  somewhere  and,  in  a 
gingerly  fashion,  take  it  off  and  put  it  on  a 
table  or  a  bureau.  Yet  twenty-five  years  ago, 
nothing  could  have  made  me  feel  so  proud,  so 
brave,  so  competent  to  face  the  entire  world 
as  a  revolver  bumping  against  my  hip.  The 
old  feeling  for  the  Fourth  of  July  has  simply 
gone,  disappeared,  evaporated  in  some  inscru 
table  fashion.  It  now  has  become  for  me  a 
day  of  genuine  misery,  unless  I  am  happy 
enough  to  spend  it  where  it  is  not  "  observed." 
211 


PREJUDICES 

In  addition  to  loathing  the  noise  because  I 
can't  help  it,  I  more  and  more  every  year  hate 
it  because  I  am  increasingly  depressed  by  the 
knowledge  of  all  the  so  easily  preventable  muti 
lations  with  which  it  is  associated;  I  hate  it 
because  of  the  pain  I  have  known  it  to  inflict 
upon  the  sick  and  dying.  Even  many  of  the 
lower  animals  of  my  acquaintance,  dogs  and 
horses  in  particular,  regularly  once  a  year 
spend  twenty-four  hours  of  mental  and  phys 
ical  agony  on  the  Fourth  of  July.  While  try 
ing  to  reassure  an  old  dog  who  had  crawled 
under  a  bed  and  collapsed  with  a  nervous  chill, 
while  trying  to  calm  the  uncontrollable  terror 
of  a  steady,  sensible,  intelligent  horse,  I  have 
often  fervently  wished  that  there  had  been  no 
Revolution  and  that  we  had  remained  a  Brit 
ish  colony. 

Thanksgiving  Day  became  a  horror  of  an 
entirely  different  kind.  As  I  look  back  on  the 
evolution  of  what  has  finally  become  my  atti 
tude  toward  holidays,  I  am  convinced  that  the 
impulse  to  my  detestation  of  the  well-meant 
festival  was  given  originally  by  the  annual 
212 


HOLIDAYS 

proclamations  of  the  Presidents  of  the  United 
States  and  the  governors  of  the  state  in  which 
I  happened  to  have  been  born  and  brought  up. 
To  be  President  of  the  United  States  of  Amer 
ica  -is,  we  are  told,  to  hold  the  highest  pos 
sible  public  office  in  the  universe,  but  appar 
ently  one  of  the  conditions  of  election  to  this 
exalted  estate  is  that  no  President  shall  ever 
officially  write  anything  for  publication  that  is 
not  obvious,  pompous,  platitudinous  and  un 
readable.  The  printed  remarks  of  governors 
are  even,  if  possible,  more  so.  Reading,  once 
in  so  often,  dear,  dead  old  phrases  about  the 
"  universal  prosperity  now  existing  through 
out  the  length  and  breadth  of  this  great  land," 
was,  I  am  sure,  what  first  began  to  make  me 
realize  that  Thanksgiving  Day  is  a  most  dread 
ful  affair. 

If  the  Fourth  of  July  drives  one  distracted 
with  its  fiendish  noise,  the  day  of  giving 
thanks  has  almost  the  same  effect  if  one  pays 
any  special  attention  to  it,  by  reason  of  its 
unnatural  quiet.  It  comes  at  a  dreary  time  of 
year  when  outside  there  is  nothing  in  particular 
213 


PREJUDICES 

to  do  and  nowhere  in  particular  to  go.  One 
stays  in  the  house  and,  some  time  during  the 
day,  eats  a  variety  of  rather  unusual  and  not 
necessarily  agreeable  things  one  would  never 
think  of  ordering  at  a  restaurant  or  a  club. 
Until  one  has  freed  oneself  from  the  thralldom 
of  holidays  (I  have),  the  semi-historical,  semi- 
culinary  torpidity  of  Thanksgiving  Day  usu 
ally  upsets  one's  routine,  one's  digestion,  one's 
entire  scheme  of  life.  It  is  as  if  the  Fourth 
of  July  had  eloped  with  Christmas  and  the  re 
sult  of  the  union  had  been  a  kind  of  illegiti 
mate  Sunday. 

And  then  Christmas.  As  I  grow  older,  its 
original  significance,  its  reason  for  being  a 
holiday  at  all,  becomes  more  full  of  meaning, 
more  touching,  more  beautiful.  It  is  not  in 
the  least  obligatory  to  be  religiously  inclined  in 
order  to  be  profoundly  moved  by  the  symbol 
ism  of  its  pathos  and  poetry.  The  incident 
stands  out,  sums  up,  crystallizes  for  us,  all  that 
in  our  gentlest  and  best  moods  we  believe 
about  the  great  facts  of  birth,  of  motherhood, 
of  infancy,  of  the  family  relation.  It  is  our 
214 


HOLIDAYS 

standard,  our  ideal;  a  serious  contemplation 
of  it  must  arouse  in  us  everything  that  is  most 
kindly,  affectionate,  generous,  humble.  The 
birth  of  the  Infant  Jesus,  the  attendant  cir 
cumstances,  the  general  scene  and  the  signifi 
cance  of  it  all  is,  I  happen  to  know,  one  of 
the  few  things  that  can  cause  a  hard-faced, 
avaricious  old  billionaire  to  sink  his  head  on 
his  library  table  and  burst  into  uncontrollable 
sobs. 

But  Christmas  itself!  I  mean  the  day  we 
have  made  of  it.  It  is  really  a  terrible  day  un 
less,  perhaps,  you  are  pretending  to  relieve  it 
with  the  children  which  some  of  us  don't 
possess.  Just  as  I  can  recall  delirious  Fourths 
of  July,  I  can  recall  Christmas  days  that  were 
a  scream  of  delight  from  energetic  dawn  until 
tired  and  sleepy  midnight.  The  delicious,  ex 
citing  smell  of  the  pine  tree,  the  feel  of  the 
"  excelsior  "  in  which  the  fragile  ornaments 
were  packed,  the  taste  of  those  red  and  yellow 
animals  made  out  of  transparent  candy,  the 
taste  of  the  little  candles  (for  some  strange, 
youthful  reason  we  always  purloined  several  of 
15  215 


PREJUDICES 

the  candles  and  chewed  them,  even  green  ones, 
in  secret.  I  can't  imagine  now  why  they  didn't 
poison  us),  the  thrilling  effect  of  cotton  bat 
ting  spread  on  the  floor  at  the  tree's  base 
(there  were  always,  of  course,  acres  of  real 
snow  just  outside  the  front  door  but  it  quite 
lacked  the  power  to  entrance  possessed  by  a 
few  square  feet  of  cotton  batting) — for  years 
I  haven't  smelled  or  tasted  or  seen  any  of  these 
things.  But  how  wonderful  they  used  to  be. 
Even  the  Christmas  we  spent  at  the  ages  of 
eight  and  five,  in  Gibraltar,  and  where  our  tree 
consisted  of  a  small  orange  tree  propped  up  in 
a  slop  jar,  was  the  real  thing.  Every  moment 
of  it  returns  palpitating  with  the  old  Christmas 
sensation. 

But  now  the  day,  aside  from  its  real  signi 
ficance,  to  which  apparently  no  great  attention 
is  paid,  has,  as  far  as  I  am  concerned,  lost  all 
its  old  magic  and  charm.  Of  late  years,  when 
I  have  been  sufficiently  foolish  to  attempt  to 
"  make  merry  "  on  Christmas,  I  have  found 
the  twenty-fifth  of  December  merely  a  memory 
that  one  can  revive,  but  to  which  one  may  not 
216 


HOLIDAYS 

give  life  or  even  a  very  successful,  galvanic 
semblance  of  life.  If,  nowadays,  I  permitted 
Christmas  to  make  any  particular  impression 
on  me,  which  I  don't,  it  would,  I  fear,  be 
chiefly  an  annoying  impression  that  I  ought 
to  be  spending  more  money  than  I  can 
afford  in  order  to  give,  to  persons  I  take 
but  little  interest  in,  presents  they  don't 
need.  At  any  rate,  that  is  the  principal 
impression  I  seem  to  derive  from  the  ante- 
Christmas  conversation  of  most  of  my  ac 
quaintances  who  still  conventionally  observe 
the  day. 

In  fact,  the  whole  question  of  holidays  had 
to  be  met  and  solved,  and  I  rejoice  in  the  fact 
that  I  have  at  last  done  it  as  successfully  as 
have  many  other  much  more  sensible  people. 
It  is  the  easier  to  do,  I  suppose,  if  circum 
stances  have  often  necessitated  one's  spending 
the  more  important  days  in  an  environment 
lacking  the  slightest  suggestion  of  domesticity. 
I  have  spent  Christmas  in  a  hotel  in  Athens, 
in  a  hotel  in  Paris,  on  shipboard,  on  a  railway 
train,  in  the  desert  of  Sahara,  in  tropical  coun- 
217 


PREJUDICES 

tries  where  it  was  all  but  impossible  to  recall 
anything  that  remotely  suggested  the  annual 
festival.  Once  I  spent  all  of  Christmas  on 
the  back  of  a  lame  mule. 

This  sort  of  thing,  unless  one  happily  pos 
sesses  a  temperament  unusually  innocent  and 
robust,  has  but  one  result:  holidays  become 
mere  dates  on  a  calendar.  They  are  welcome 
intruders  if  one  happens  to  be  tied  down  day 
after  day,  as  most  of  us  are,  to  any  one  exact 
ing  and  monotonous  occupation,  but  the  way  to 
enjoy  them,  to  extract  the  best  from  them  is, 
I  have  found,  to  ignore  them.  It  is  an  im 
measurable  satisfaction  when  you  at  last  haul 
down  the  flag  and  tell  yourself  that  you  don't 
in  the  least  care  what  other  people  are  doing 
on  a  certain  day ;  when  you  finally  cast  out  the 
disturbing  belief  that  you  ought  to  engage  in 
some  irritating  or  melancholy  activity,  gen 
erally  supposed  to  be  in  keeping  with  the  oc 
casion.  To  observe  Christmas  by  not  observ 
ing  it  at  all  but  by  doing  what  you  really  feel 
like  doing  on  a  day  of  leisure,  to  dine  on  bread 
and  butter  and  a  cup  of  tea  on  Thanksgiving 
218 


HOLIDAYS 

Day  because  they  are  what  you  most  want,  to 
seek  on  the  Fourth  of  July  a  locality  in  which 
there  is  absolute  quiet,  all  require  some  courage 
and,  I  regret  to  say,  a  certain  age,  but  it  is 
worth  it. 


SERVANTS 


SERVANTS 

POLITE  existence  seems  to  be  composed, 
in  part,  of  a  warp  (or  do  I,  perhaps, 
mean  a  woof?)  of  funny  little  preten 
sions  and  affectations,  of  rather  meaningless 
standards  and  conventions,  make-believes  and 
poses.  The  polite  world,  broadly  speaking,  al 
ways  seems  to  be  divided  into  two  classes; 
those  who  swallow  it  all  whole,  who  believe  in 
it,  who  practice  and  live  up  to  it,  and  those 
who  really  don't,  but  who  pretend  they  do 
for  fear  of  forfeiting  the  esteem  of  the  others. 
We  all  know  persons  wTho  quite  simply  have 
been  born  into  the  world  with  what  might 
be  called  aristocratic  temperaments  and  in 
stincts.  They  do  not  affect  it ;  they  cannot  help 
it ;  it  is  innate,  and  they  automatically  observe 
the  conventions  because  they  like  to,  because  it 
is  the  line  of  least  resistance.  On  the  other 
223 


PREJUDICES 

hand,  no  end  of  us  go  through  almost  precisely 
the  same  motions,  but  without  conviction,  and, 
when  we  feel  reasonably  sure  that  we  sha'n't 
be  found  out,  we.  relax  and  give  a  certain 
amount  of  free  play  to  what  happens  to  be  our 
natures. 

In  few  human  relations  does  this  fact  seem 
to  me  to  be  more  clearly  revealed  than  in  the 
attitude  of  the  polite  toward  their  servants. 
There  is  really,  if  one  pauses  to  think  about  it, 
a  tremendous  amount  of  bunkum  in  the  alleged 
relations  between  most  of  one's  acquaintances 
and  the  people  who  attend  to  their  various 
need?.  I  don't  say  all,  because  the  sincere  ex 
ceptions  at  once  suggest  themselves,  but  in 
the  case  of  most  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that 
the  matter  is  largely  regulated  by  "  what  other 
people  would  think,"  rather  than  by  natural 
promptings — by  human  spontaneity.  How 
often  have  I  heard  a  woman  or  a  man  scorn 
fully  exclaim,  "  Servant's  gossip!  "  or,  "  She's 
the  sort  of  woman  who  listens  to  her  serv 
ants  !  "  The  first  great  crime  apparently  is  to 
take  the  slightest  interest  in  the  point  of  view, 
224 


SERVANTS 

the  ideas,  the.  information  or  the  conversation 
of  one's  servants.  Conventionally  they  are, 
none  of  them,  supposed  to  have  intelligence, 
integrity  or  the  gift  of  being  agreeable.  Of 
course  no  end  of  people  converse  with  their 
servants  incessantly  and  derive  from  the  pro 
ceeding  much  interest  and  amusement,  but  they 
very  rarely  admit  it,  and  when  they  do,  it  is 
always  in  a  deprecating,  apologetic  fashion 
calculated  to  impress  you  with  the  fact  that 
the  incident  was  quite  out  of  the  ordinary — - 
which,  secretly,  I  never  believe  it  is.  "  Some 
times  I  let  Mary  Ann  run  on.  For  a  maid  she 
is  really  rather,"  etc.  For  some,  to  me  inscru 
table,  reason,  hardly  anybody  admits  that  he 
ever  talks  to  a  servant  on  a  basis  of  intellectual 
equality,  and  furthermore,  hardly  anybody  ever 
admits,  without  in  some  way  qualifying  the 
admission,  that  a  servant  is  good-looking;  that 
he,  or  she,  as  the  case  may  be,  in  different 
clothes  and  removed  from  the  yoke  of  servi 
tude,  might  be  indistinguishable  from  the  per 
sons  he  serves,  and  in  many  instances  much 
more  charming  in  appearance. 
225 


PREJUDICES 

"  When  Connor,  the  second  man,  is  dressed 
up,  he  isn't  a  bad-looking  man  at  all.  You 
might  almost  mistake  him  for  something  else," 
I  have  had  a  fat,  coarse-skinned,  rich,  middle- 
aged  woman  half  humorously  assure  me  in 
speaking  of  one  of  her  footmen,  whose  mere 
presence  in  the  room  made  her  entire  family 
appear  to  be  even  more  common  than  they  ac 
tually  were.  The  aristocratic  tendency  must 
have  been  omitted  from  me,  for  I  have  never 
been  able  to  detect  on  my  part  the  slightest  de 
sire  to  apologize  for  either  intelligence  or 
beauty  wherever  I  wonderfully  discovered  it. 
If  it  is  there,  it  is  there,  and  instantly  recogniz 
able.  But  in  the  case  of  servants,  it,  for  some 
reason,  does  not  seem  to  be  quite  "  the  thing  " 
to  admit  it. 

Frankly,  I  like  to  talk  to  servants  and  always 
do  when  I  feel  conversationally  inclined,  and 
one  of  them  is  available.  I  extremely  enjoy 
hearing  what  they  have  to  say  about  their  em 
ployment,  their  wages,  their  ambitions,  the 
kind  of  treatment  they  receive  from  their  em 
ployers  and  the  characteristics  of  their  em- 
226 


SERVANTS 

ployers.  From  servants  I  have  learned  many 
curious  and  amazing  things  about  people  I 
thought  I  knew  tolerably  well  and  really  didn't 
because  I  had  never  been  their  servant.  And 
I  am  not  in  the  least  ashamed  of  having  learned 
these  things  by  chatting  pleasantly  with  serv 
ants;  I  am  glad  of  it,  for  it  has  added  greatly 
to  my  understanding  of  people  and  life. 
Nothing  is  more  interesting  than  the  contem 
plation  of  our  little  world  from  as  many  dif 
ferent  angles  as  possible.  The  servant's  angle 
is  one  of  the  most  acute.  From  servants  one 
learns  how  a  striking  variety  of  persons  con 
duct  themselves  under  almost  all  the  circum 
stances  to  which  human  beings  are  subjected. 
It  is,  indeed,  from  them  alone  that  one  can  find 
out  about  such  matters;  one's  personal  experi 
ence,  after  all,  is  necessarily  limited  to  so  few 
intimate,  human  contacts  and  incidents.  To 
talk  frankly  with  intelligent  servants  is  to  re 
ceive  a  great  light  and  to  re-awaken  the  in 
terest  in  one's  fellow-man  that  at  times  has  a 
tendency  to  doze. 

Stewards  on  ocean  steamers  invariably  re- 
227 


PREJUDICES 

pay  one  with  reflections  on  the  world  in  gen 
eral  for  whatever  time  one  spends  with  them. 
They  see  such  an  unending  procession  of 
human  beings  that,  from  the  remarks  of  smok 
ing-room  stewards,  I  have  felt  that,  for  them, 
the  individual  has  almost  ceased  to  exist  and 
is  instinctively  pigeonholed,  as  a  type.  They 
seem  to  be  able  to  take  a  man's  measure  at  a 
glance,  and  they  usually  take  it  with  astonish 
ing  accuracy.  I  don't  mean  that  their  appraisal 
begins  and  ends  with  the  probable  amount  of 
the  gentleman's  tip;  they  are  far  from  being 
as  avaricious  as  they  are  supposed  to  be.  They 
know  whether  he  will  be  exigent  or  easy  to 
please,  whether  he  will  have  consideration  for 
them,  or  keep  them  needlessly  running  back 
and  forth  from  a  half-consciousness  that  it  is 
within  his  right,  according  to  the  manner  in 
which  the  world  is  arranged,  to  do  so.  They 
know  at  once  whether  he  will  regard  them  as 
a  mere  machine,  or  a  natural  enemy,  or  a  serv 
ant  with  several  almost  human  attributes,  or  a 
human  being  who  chances,  for  the  time,  to  be 
acting  in  the  capacity  of  one  who  serves. 
228 


SERVANTS 

Those,  broadly  speaking,  are  the  four  ways  in 
which  servants  are  usually  looked  upon.  Per 
sonally,  I  never  can  quite  comprehend  the 
point  of  view  that  does  not  see  a  servant  in 
the  fashion  I  have  mentioned  last.  And  yet, 
judging  from  remarks  that  are  made  to  one 
by  both  women  and  men  about  their  servants, 
and  from  the  testimony  of  those  engaged  in 
this  form  of  labor,  this  manner  of  appreciating 
the  servant  class  does  not  seem  to  be  a  usual 
one. 

Many  persons  I  know  actually  employ,  in 
speaking  to  a  servant,  an  entirely  different  tone 
of  voice  from  the  one  they  make  use  of  habitu 
ally.  In  giving  an  order,  or  asking  a  question, 
the  sounds  ordinarily  produced  by  their  vocal 
chords  undergo  a  sudden  and  entire  change; 
they  become  dry,  hard,  metallic,  and  as  im 
personal  as  the  human  voice  can  sound.  It  is 
not  that  they  are  angry  or  irritated,  or  have 
hard  hearts;  it  is  merely  because  they  are 
speaking  to  a  servant,  and  for  some  reason, 
altogether  obscure  to  me,  this  proceeding  neces 
sitates  a  difference  in  vocal  pitch,  key  and  in- 

22Q 


PREJUDICES 

flection.  Several  persons  of  whom  I  am,  for 
many  reasons,  extremely  fond,  have  developed 
this  characteristic  to  such  an  extent  that  I  have 
long  since  avoided  dining  with  them,  meeting 
them  in  clubs,  or,  in  fact,  having  any  relations 
with  them  that  involve  the  presence  of  a  so- 
called  "  inferior.''  I  find  it  too  embarrassing, 
too  mortifying;  I  always  have  an  all  but  ir 
resistible  desire  to  exclaim  to  the  patient,  well- 
mannered  human  being  who  is  endeavoring  to 
make  us  comfortable :  "  Please  don't  mind 
him,  or  feel  badly  about  it.  He  isn't  at  all  the 
insufferable  ass  he  sounds  like."  Long  obser 
vation  has  convinced  me  that  this  fashion — it 
seems  to  be  more  a  fashion,  after  all.  than 
anything  else — is  not  nearly  as  prevalent  in  the 
West  as  it  is  in  the  East.  With  but  few  ex 
ceptions,  the  men  at  the  club  I  most  frequent 
in  the  West  speak  to  the  servants  in  their  ordi 
nary  tone  of  voice;  the  same  natural  and 
courteous  tone  they  would  adopt  in  speaking 
to  anyone  else.  Just  what  this  proves,  I  can't 
quite  make  up  my  mind.  It  might  mean  that 
in  the  West  we  are  rather  more  human  and 
230 


SERVANTS 

kindly,  or  it  might,  perhaps,  mean  that  we  have 
not  become  so  accustomed  to  that  unfathom 
able  stratum  of  the  race  known  as  English 
servants. 

English  servants  in  nowise  resemble  the 
servants  of  other  countries.  The  status  of 
everyone  of  them  is  definitely  fixed ;  I  feel  sure 
it  appears  somewhere  in  that  unwritten  con 
stitution  of  England  about  which  one  hears 
and  reads  so  much.  They  seem  to  be  a  class 
apart,  a  caste.  Their  outlines  are  defined  with 
the  most  absolute  exactitude.  They  never 
merge  or  melt  or  even  temporarily  fade  into 
other  and  different  outlines.  They  are  what 
they  are,  and  they  know  it  and  accept  it.  About 
them  has  grown  up  a  conventional  manner  of 
treating  them,  of  thinking  about  them,  and 
alluding  to  them.  It  isn't  exactly  a  cruel 
manner.  It  is  the  manner  to  which  I  have  re 
ferred;  one  from  which  every  personal,  sym 
pathetic,  genial  quality  has  been  carefully  elim 
inated  ;  one  in  which  the  necessary  words  are 
reduced  to  their  simplest,  most  direct  and  un 
adorned  minimum.  "  Good  "  English  servants 
16  231 


PREJUDICES 

not  only  do  not  mind  this,  they  are  used  to  it 
and  expect  it.  The  part  they  play  in  life  in 
cludes  being  verbally  kicked  for  so  much  a 
year.  It  is  because  of  the  greater  prevalence 
in  the  East  of  English  butlers  and  footmen,  I 
am  sometimes  inclined  to  believe,  that  one 
more  often  hears  the  "  correct  "  tone  in  speak 
ing  to  a  servant  in  New  York  and  Boston,  than 
one  does  in  the  cities  of  the  West. 

But  there  are  other  ways  of  making  servants 
"  know  their  place  "  of  which  we  in  the  West 
are  by  no  means  guiltless.  One  woman  of  my 
acquaintance  invariably  refuses  to  engage  a 
maid  who  possesses  that  all  but  indispensable 
appurtenance  known  as  a  "  gentleman  friend." 
Another,  for  some  cryptic  reason,  never  allows 
a  servant  to  take  a  trunk  upstairs.  All  trunks 
must  be  unpacked  and  repacked  downstairs.  I 
don't  know  why ;  neither  do  they.  It  is  merely 
one  of  her  edicts,  and  it  has  contributed  not  a 
little  to  the  local  "  servant  problem." 

For  the  employer's  view  of  the  local  "  serv 
ant  problem  "  I  have  never  been,  able  to  feel 
the  slightest  sympathy,  as  I  can  imagine  no 
232 


SERVANTS 

proposition  more  naively  selfish.  The  problem, 
as  far  as  I  can  formulate  it,  seems  to  consist 
of  the  fact  that  many  persons  in  the  world  are 
disinclined  to  give  up  their  liberty,  and  to  con 
secrate  their  entire  lives  to  the  whims  and  man 
dates  of  some  tiresome  woman  who  yearns  to 
underpay  them.  How  otherwise  admirable 
women  resent  having  to  remunerate  their 
cooks !  I  know  they  do,  because  I  have 
frequently  heard  them  as  much  as  say  so. 
Looked  at  honestly,  the  whole  problem  re 
solves  itself  into  just  this :  servants  are  a  lux 
ury.  Any  one  of  us  could  make  beds,  dust, 
scrub,  wait  on  the  table,  open  the  front  door, 
wash  clothes,  and  cook.  (As  a  matter  of  fact, 
I  have  done,  at  various  times,  all  of  these 
things  with  complete  success.)  But  for  one 
reason  or  another  we  prefer  to  have  somebody 
else  do  them  for  us.  We  could  do  them  our 
selves,  but  we  desire  the  luxury  of  a  servant, 
or  of  half  a  dozen  servants.  Yet  most  persons 
seem  to  be  distinctly  reluctant  to  part  with  the 
amount  of  money  a  servant  can  once  a  month 
command.  They  complain  bitterly  that  wages 

233 


PREJUDICES 

are  becoming  higher.  Why  shouldn't  wages 
become  higher  if  parlor  maids  and  cooks  can 
command  them?  Servants,  I  repeat,  are  a 
luxury.  They  do  something  for  us  that  we 
could  do  ourselves,  but  don't  wish  to.  We  deny 
ourselves  other  luxuries  when  we  can't  afford 
them;  why  not  deny  ourselves  servants  if  we 
can't  conveniently  pay  the  wages  they  are  en 
titled  to?  It  is  an  odd  fact  that  we  don't. 
Instead,  we  pay  the  wages  and  then  complain 
and  lament  and  get  together  and  discuss  "  the 
servant  problem." 

A  cook,  who  had  lived  for  several  years 
with  a  family  of  my  acquaintance,  abruptly 
left  them  because  another  household  offered 
her  a  dollar  a  month  more.  In  my  opinion, 
her  action  was  quite  right.  Why  shouldn't 
she  have  done  so?  A  dollar  is,  after  all,  a 
dollar.  But  the  family  she  left,  a  kind,  al 
most  intelligent  family,  at  that,  has  never 
ceased  to  talk  of  what  they  call  her  "  ingrati 
tude."  I  confess  I  am  unable  to  see  it.  Like 
millions  of  other  American  families,  they  seem 
to  think  that  to  drudge  under  the  same  roof 
234 


SERVANTS 

with  them  was  a  privilege,  but  if  one  pauses 
to  examine  the  situation,  it  really  wasn't. 

I  wish  I  had  space  enough  in  which  to  re 
call  some  of  the  servants  I  have  known  best, 
beginning,  at  a  very  early  age,  with  one  Ger 
man  and  three  French  governesses,  continuing 
with  dear  Mrs.  Chester,  who  took  care  of  my 
rooms  when  I  was  in  college,  and  about  whom 
I  have  written  minutely  and  affectionately 
elsewhere ;  of  Miss  Shedd,  the  washwoman,  to 
whom  I  left  in  my  will  the  photograph  of  a 
Madonna  she  greatly  admired,  but  who  hap 
pened  to  die  before  I  did,  recounting,  it  gave 
me  pleasure  to  be  told,  my  various  virtues  in 
her  last  delirium ;  of  the  Madrassi  servant  1 
had  in  India,  who,  for  no  particular  reason, 
used  to  burst  into  tears  once  a  week,  and  de 
clare  that  I  was  his  "  father  and  mother  " ;  of 
the  Jap,  who  looked  down  on  me  because  he 
was  a  "  Master,"  whereas  I  was  only  a  "  Bach 
elor,"  of  Arts;  of  Aunt  Nancy,  who  died  last 
winter,  after  continuous,  unbroken  service  in 
our  family  for  seventy-seven  years  (the  last 
fifteen  or  twenty  years,  I  confess,  did  not  in- 

235 


PREJUDICES 

elude  occupation  other  than  keeping  alive  on 
rye  whisky  and  pipefuls  of  cut  plug  tobacco)  ; 
of  the  marvelous  servant  in  a  popular  Paris 
restaurant,  whose  only  function  was  "  to 
pacify  the  guests."  Although  dressed  as  a 
waiter,  he  never  actually  waited.  He,  instead, 
drifted  about  from  table  to  table  engaging 
one  in  conversation,  soothing  the  complainers, 
lulling  the  impatient.  He  was  tall  and  thin 
with  a  long,  intelligent  nose.  Balzac  would 
have  immortalized  him.  He  had  a  genius  for 
tiding  over  the  irritation  of  red-faced  men  in 
a  hurry.  When  he  saw  that  one  had  almost 
reached  the  point  of  explosion,  he  would 
saunter  up  to  the  table  and  begin  to  talk.  In  a 
few  seconds  the  impatient,  red-faced  man 
would  be  proclaiming  his  opinion  on  some 
burning  question  of  the  day,  and  before  he  had 
finished,  his  belated  order  would  be  served. 

Like  everyone  else,  I  have  ideas  for  some 
five  hundred  books  and  fifty  plays.  One  of  the 
books  will  be  called  "  Servants." 


MRS.   WHITE'S 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

THIS  morning  I  read  in  the  paper  of 
the  death  of  Mrs.  White,  and  the 
short,  inadequate  paragraph  startled 
me,  not  exactly  because  Mrs.  White  was  dead, 
but  rather  because  until  yesterday  afternoon 
she  was  alive.  I  had  assumed  that  the  good 
lady  (how  I  wish  I  could  remember  just  when 
I  left  off  hating  her  and  began  to  think  of 
her  as  a  good  lady!)  had  died  years  ago  and 
there  was  something  grotesque  and  uncanny 
in  her  suddenly  up  and  dying  again  out  of  a 
blue  sky,  so  to  speak.  It  was  very  much  as  if 
someone  should  pop  out  of  an  old  tomb  in 
a  cemetery,  take  a  hasty  look  around  and  then 
pop  in  again.  If  I  had  not  long  ago  ceased 
to  feel  bitterly  about  her,  I  should  have  told 
myself  that  it  was  just  like  Mrs.  White,  that 
she  was  not  a  sincere  woman,  that  she  had 
239 


PREJUDICES 

never  inspired  me  with  confidence.  But  water 
has  been  flowing  under  the  bridge  for  thirty- 
two  years  since  my  tears  used  to  flow  at  Mrs. 
White's,  and  it  so  long  ago  eroded  my  bit 
terness  that  I  now  cannot  recall  when  it  was 
I  last  had  any.  Had  I  been  asked  yester 
day  how  old  Mrs.  White  would  be  by  this 
time,  I  should  have  answered  very  conserva 
tively  for  fear  of  seeming  to  exaggerate, 
"  About  a  hundred  and  ninety-six,"  and  the 
paper  tells  me  she  "  passed  away  "  in  her  sev 
enty-first  year.  Good  heavens — then  when  I 
knew  her  and  regarded  her  as  a  senile  monster 
with  a  gizzard  of  granite,  she  must  really  have 
been  a  nice-looking  young  woman  of  thirty- 
eight.  How  very  strange. 

Whenever  I  begin  to  think  of  Mrs.  White's 
I  have  an  unusually  uncontrollable  desire  to 
write  my  memoirs.  I'm  sure  I  don't  know 
why  I  have  always  so  longed  to  write  my 
memoirs.  Perhaps  it  is  because  I  know  that 
memoirs,  however  inane,  are  the  only  form  of 
literature  that  is  absolutely  sure  of  getting  it 
self  read.  Then,  too,  they  must  be  so  easy  to 
240 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

produce.  They  don't  have  to  be  by  anybody 
in  particular,  and  they  present  no  technical 
difficulties  whatever.  They  have  to  begin 
somewhere,  but  one  need  never  be  bothered  by 
wondering  how  they  ought  to  end.  They 
don't  end,  they  merely  stop.  Very  often  in 
deed  they  refuse  to  do  even  that.  Madame 
de  Genlis,  for  instance,  after  minutely  cover 
ing  the  ground  in  her  "  Souvenirs,"  trimmed 
a  new  pen  and,  without  pausing  to  separate 
herself  into  chapters  or  to  take  breath,  dashed 
off  eight  obese  volumes  of  "  Memoires."  Like 
all  works  of  this  nature,  they  are  "  perfectly 
fascinating "  and  are  still  read,  but  there  is 
no  reason  whatever  why  I  shouldn't  produce 
eight  volumes  just  as  twaddlesome.  For  be 
yond  writing  materials  and  a  tireless  forearm 
there  are  in  the  manufacture  of  memoirs  only 
two  essentials :  one  must  live  during  an  in 
teresting  period  of  the  world's  history  and  one 
must  from  time  to  time  meet,  or  at  the  very 
least  see,  a  variety  of  well-known  persons. 
These  conditions  are  extremely  difficult  to 
avoid.  They  arise  quite  naturally  after  one 
241 


PREJUDICES 

has  taken  the  first  costly  and  fatally  easy  step 
of  being  born  at  all.     Seventy  years  afterward 
every  period  of  the  world's  history  is  intensely 
interesting  and   nowadays   it   is   quite  impos 
sible  for  the  modest,  the  retiring,  the  obscure, 
to  evade  the  overtures  of  the  celebrated.     The 
manner  in  which  they  lie  in  wait  for  us  un 
known  ones,  hunt  us  down,  in  fact,  is  pathetic 
but  brazen.    They  infest  otherwise  restful  and 
pleasant    clubs,    they    pervade    dinners,    they 
hang  on  the  edge  of  evening  parties,  demand 
ing  to  be  met  and  talked  to  when  one  would 
rather  dance  or   look   on.     They   are  always 
cropping  out  or  "  butting  in  "  to  the  interrup 
tion  of  one's  satisfactory  routine,  just  as  the 
marvels  of  the  Yellowstone  Park  impose  upon 
the   placid,    smiling    face    of    nature.      When 
they    happen    to   be    royal,    they   ruin    health- 
resorts,  make  good  hotels  uninhabitable,  render 
null  and  void  the  printed  schedules  of  railways. 
One   summer   in   Paris   I   spent  most  of  five 
weeks    in    vainly    endeavoring   to    dodge    the 
Shah  of  Persia.     I  hardly  ever  went  anywhere 
that  he  and  his  gentlemen  in  waiting  didn't 
242 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

arrive  a  few  minutes  later  and  upset  my  plans 
for  the  day.  On  account  of  him  a  brutal  and 
licentious  soldiery  has  driven  me  from  the 
Louvre,  the  Luxembourg  and  the  Pantheon 
with  drawn  swords,  and  shoved  me  around 
and  around  the  foyers  of  most  of  the  music 
halls,  but  later  on  I  shall,  no  doubt,  refer  to 
him  thus :  "  When  not  long  afterward  I  was 
greatly  shocked  by  the  news  of  this  pleasure- 
loving  but  beneficent  ruler's  assassination,  I 
recalled  his  vivacious,  oriental,  if  at  times 
somewhat  drowsy  personality  with  genuine 
regret."  (Sunlight  and  Shadows  of  My  Long 
Life,  Vol.  VI,  p.  982.)  And  a  year  ago  in 
South  America,  where  I  naively  supposed  that 
I  should  certainly  be  safe,  I  had  scarcely  set 
foot  within  the  city  limits  of  Buenos  Aires  be 
fore  I  was,  metaphorically  speaking,  drugged, 
sandbagged  and  introduced  to  Mr.  William 
Jennings  Bryan.  In  his  pseudo-presidential 
frock  coat  and  square-toed  kid  shoes  he  looked 
precisely  like  a  portrait  of  himself  on  the  front 
page  of  Puck  after  it  has  been  fingered  for  a 
week  in  a  barber  shop. 

243 


PREJUDICES 

" '  Yes,'  he  replied  with  the  virile  hand 
grasp  that  has  changed  the  vote  of  millions, 
'  yes/  he  heartily  agreed,  '  the  days  are  hot  in 
South  America  but  the  nights  are  cool,  and  I 
always  maintain  that  cool  nights  are  more 
than  half  the  battle.'  Except  for  the  sorcery  of 
his  voice  and  the  poignant  pleasure  he  took 
in  making  my  acquaintance,  I  think  it  was  this 
recurrent  note  of  the  man's  wholesome  opti 
mism  that  most  profoundly  impressed  me." 
(Shadows  and  Sunlight  of  My  Short  Life, 
Vol.  IX,  p.  1024.)  I  left  Buenos  Aires  at  once 
and  went  to  Montevideo,  but  literally  in  less 
than  fifteen  minutes  after  I  disembarked  and 
strolled  up  to  the  principal  Plaza  I  absent- 
mindedly  followed  two  fat  gentlemen  in  even 
ing  dress  (it  was  three  o'clock  of  a  fine  after 
noon)  into  a  public  building  of  some  kind,  and 
immediately  found  myself  eating  candied  pine 
apple  and  drinking  Pan-American  toasts  in 
warm,  sweet  champagne,  with  the  President  of 
Uruguay.  The  distinguished,  the  celebrated, 
the  notorious,  the  great — from  one's  earliest 
years  it  is  impossible  to  elude  them. 
244 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

Presidents !  I  shall  devote  sixty-five  printed 
pages  to  them,  beginning  with  the  summer 
evening  when  on  an  errand  of  mercy  (a  friend 
of  mine  had  robbed  the  till  of  a  grocery 
store  and  had  sent  for  me  from  the  police 
station)  I  became  submerged  in  a  sea  of  hu 
man  faces  that  were  waiting  for  the  Presi 
dent  and  Mrs.  Cleveland,  and  tost  in  about 
five  minutes  a  new  four-dollar  straw  hat,  a 
scarf  pin,  the  left  sleeve  of  my  coat  (an  in 
toxicated  patriot  pulled  it  out  by  the  roots  and 
waved  it)  and  nearly,  my  eager,  useful  life. 
For  a  middle-aged  woman  clinging  to  a  win 
dow  below  which  I  was  helplessly  imbedded 
suddenly  fainted  and  fell  on  me.  The  crowd 
was  so  solidly  packed  that  we  were  unable, 
for  an  eternity,  to  stuff  her  into  an  interstice — 
to  restore  her  right  side  up  to  the  perpendi 
cular,  and  all  the  time  we  were  doing  our 
best  to  control  her  arms  and  legs,  and  she  was 
kicking  noses  off  with  her  heels  and  gouging 
eyes  out  with  her  thumbs,  the  people  in  the 
window  were  throwing,  first  glassfuls,  then 
pitcherfuls,  and  finally  pailfuls  of  water  on 
245 


PREJUDICES 

us,  and  beseeching  with  paroxysms  of  mirth, 
"  Won't  somebody  please  bring  a  little  water ; 
a  lady  has  fainted."  As  for  writers,  opera- 
singers,  bishops,  actors,  diplomatists,  Napo 
leons  of  finance  and  members  of  the  nobility, 
they  are  always  scuttling  about  nowadays. 
"  It  were  a  sorrow  to  count  them."  I  shall 
make  them  say  some  of  the  most  surprising 
things,  but  in  the  case  of  persons  who  have 
died  I  shall  write  my  memoirs  conscientiously 
throughout  and  record  only  the  remarks  they 
would  have  enjoyed  making  but  were  unable 
to  think  of  at  the  time. 

My  audience  at  the  age  of  eight  with  His 
Holiness  Pope  Leo  XIII,  I  have  always 
thought  would  open  volume  the  first  most 
auspiciously.  One  could  draw  such  a  charm 
ing  little  picture  of  the  ivory-white,  ethereal 
old  man  laying  his  hand  for  a  moment  on  my 
shock  of  yellow  hair  and  smiling  affectionately 
at  my  wondering,  upturned  face.  I  remember 
I  held  the  ends  of  his  fingers  and  was  begin 
ning  to  examine  his  ring  when  someone 
prodded  me  in  the  back  and  in  a  hoarse,  agi- 
246 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

tated  whisper,  reminded  me  to  kiss  it.  I'm 
sure  I  could  do  all  sorts  of  pleasant  things  with 
that  unearthly  smile  and  tremulous  blessing 
and  sunny  hair  and  upturned  face,  but  chrono 
logically  Mrs.  White's  takes  precedence,  al 
though  even  Mrs.  White's  is  not  the  incident 
in  my  intellectual  development  that  I  first  re 
member.  Sometime  before  then  the  detached, 
austere  figure  of  a  beautiful  woman  became 
part  of  my  consciousness  and  recollection  and 
has  marvelously  remained  so  ever  since.  She 
was  at  the  Centennial  Exhibition  of  1876 
whither  I  was  taken  almost  in  the  arms  of  a 
fond,  and  in  that  instance  foolish,  grand 
mother.  Gone,  gone  is  the  exhibition;  I  re 
call  nothing  of  it  except  a  broad,  hot  walk 
in  a  park,  bordered  by  gorgeous  flowers.  But 
at  the  other  end  of  it,  no  doubt  in  "  Agri 
cultural  Hall,"  alone  on  a  platform  and  sur 
rounded  by  the  ingenuous  Americans  of  that 
day,  stood  the  woman.  Jets  of  ice  water 
played  gently  upon  her  soft  and  gracefully 
molded  limbs,  for  they  were  of  butter  and  far 
from  acclimated  to  the  debilitating  atmosphere 
17  247 


PREJUDICES 

of  Philadelphia  in  July.  I  loved  that  oleo- 
marginal  morgue  and  screamed  to  be  taken 
back  to  it  whenever  I  was,  as  I  had  to  be  from 
time  to  time,  forcibly  removed.  I  can't  now 
remember  the  appearance  at  that  time  of  any 
thing  or  anybody  else,  even  of  the  grand 
mother  who  chaperoned  us,  but  I  should  in 
stantly  recognize  the  dear,  long  since  melted 
work  of  art  in  any  creamery  of  the  world. 

Mrs.  White's  \vas  a  parental  mistake.  Some 
children  are  born  without  the  kindergarten 
temperament,  and  when  this  happens  the  effort 
to  develop  it  is  usually  futile.  Not  that  my 
mother  consciously  attempted  to  do  so.  A 
short  time  ago  I  asked  her  why  she  had  been 
guilty  of  sending  me  to  Mrs.  White's,  of 
blighting  even  in  the  bud  an  originally  fine 
mind,  and  she  was  obliged  to  confess  she 
didn't  know.  There  was  in  the  act  no  high 
and  definite  concept  of  education.  I  suspect 
her  of  motives  as  mixed  as  they  were  worthy. 
By  sending  me  to  Mrs.  White's  she  could 
relieve  the  household  of  my  beloved  but  ex 
hausting  society  for  hours  and  hours  and  hours 
248 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

at  a  time,  she  could  "  help  Mrs.  White  along  " 
and  she  could  give  me  the  opportunity  of  learn 
ing  "  how  to  observe."  Mrs.  White's  was 
the  first  of  Froebel's  infantile  observatories 
to  make  its  appearance  in  our  town  and  strange 
things  were  expected  of  it. 

The  prospectus  said  that  "  the  busy  baby 
fingers  "  were  "  trained  from  the  first  to  co 
ordinate  and  keep  pace  with  the  germinating 
mentality "  which,  I  was  to  find  out,  was 
merely  a  polite  paraphrase  of  the  good  old  ex 
pression  "unmitigated  hell."  Every  morning  a 
dire  conveyance  locally  known  as  the  "  White 
Maria,"  drawn  by  two  rusty,  long-haired  bay 
ponies  and  driven  by  Mr.  White  who  was  like 
wise  long-haired,  rusty  and  bay,  careened  up 
to  our  door  at  half-past  eight  and  shortly  after 
wards,  depending  on  the  length  of  time  it  had 
taken  to  extricate  me  from  the  banisters  of 
the  front  stairs  among  which  I  had  entangled 
my  arms  and  legs  and  between  which  I  had 
thrust  my  head  in  order  to  render  my  removal 
as  difficult  and  painful  as  possible  for  all  con 
cerned,  my  father  would  emerge  from  the 
249 


PREJUDICES 

house  flushed,  panting  but  triumphant  with  me, 
screaming,  kicking  but  defeated  in  his  arms. 
He  would  then  transport  me,  still  howling,  to 
the  White  Maria,  thrust  me  in,  slam  the  door 
(it  opened  at  the  back)  and  return  to  exclaim 
to  my  mother,  "  I  really  don't  see  how  we  can 
keep  this  up  much  longer."  Once  inside  the 
White  Maria  the  busy  baby  fingers  began 
straightway  to  coordinate  and  keep  pace  with 
the  germinating  mentality  by  transforming  the 
dusky  interior  into  a  veritable  black  hole  of 
Calcutta.  I  slapped  faces,  pulled  hair,  kicked 
shins,  threw  lunch-baskets  on  the  floor  and 
stamped  upon  their  contents,  while  the  other 
children,  goaded  on  to  madness  and  piercing 
shrieks,  ran  amuck  and  did  the  same.  Mr. 
White  never  interfered  with  this  perambu 
lating  inferno  both  because  he  was  of  an  in 
corrigible  cheerfulness — the  result  of  a  severe 
sunstroke — and  because  he  couldn't  see  it.  As 
one  of  Mrs.  White's  specialties  was  the  ob 
servation  of  nature  in  all  its  various,  ever 
pleasing  and  instructive  moods,  the  superstruc 
ture  of  the  White  Maria  was  a  kind  of  li- 
250 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

mousine  of  black  oilcloth  that  at  any  season  of 
the  year  effectually  shut  out  air,  light,  the 
passing  landscape  and  also  Mr.  White.  The 
"  precious  freight  "  (as  Mrs.  White  called  us) 
within  could  therefore  dismember  one  another 
undisturbed.  After  stopping  at  several  more 
houses  to  recruit  our  spent  legions  we  finally 
arrived  at  the  school,  furious,  tearful,  dishev 
eled,  hating  life  as  we  have  never  hated  it 
since,  and  proceeded  at  once  to  praise  God  in 
song  and  thank  Him  for  our  manifold  and  in 
scrutable  blessings. 

"  Oh,  blessed  work, 
Oh,  blessed  play, 
We  thank  thee  for 
Another  day," 

was  the  mendacious  refrain  of  every  stanza. 
When  sufficiently  irritated  by  anything  I  can 
still  sometimes  remember  the  tune.  Later  in 
the  morning  we  were  supplied  with  round  flat 
disks  like  poker  chips  and  again  burst  reluct 
antly  into  melody,  exclaiming  this  time,  as  we 
shied  the  disks  into  a  basket  on  the  floor, 


PREJUDICES 

"  Did  you  ever,  ever  play 
Skipping  pebbles  on  the  bay, 
On  the  [something-or-other]  water  ?  " 

Just  what  kind  of  water  it  was,  I  have  never 
been  able  to  recall.  The  missing  adjective  has 
worried  me  for  years.  All  over  the  world 
I  have  lain  awake  at  night  skipping  pebbles  on 
the  bay  for  hours  and  wondering  whether  the 
water  was  "  shining  "  or  "  glassy  "  or  "  rip 
pling  "  or  "  placid  "  or  "  deep  blue."  Metrical 
exigencies  of  course  insist  that  the  name  shall 
be  writ  in  water  of  two  syllables  and  I  have 
often  cajoled  myself  into  a  troubled  sleep  by 
almost  deciding  that  this  particular  water  must 
have  been  "  pretty."  But  even  "  pretty  "  lacks 
the  certain  completely  vapid  authenticity  that 
ever  eludes  me. 

The  blessed  play  was  ghastly  enough  but 
the  blessed  work  was  torture.  I  was  endowed 
with  neither  skill  nor  patience  and  at  that  time 
I  could  not  lose  my  shyness  before  strangers 
except  when  I  lost  my  temper.  The  public  ex 
hibition  of  my  inability  to  "  coordinate  "  was 
a  daily  anguish,  and  I  do  not  yet  understand 
252 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

how  I  ever  at  last  achieved  the  unspeakably 
hideous  mat  of  magenta  and  yellow  paper  that 
after  the  death  of  my  grandmother  I  found 
spotlessly  preserved  among  her  most  cherished 
possessions.  But  I  not  only  did — I  further 
more  succeeded  after  days  and  days  of  agony 
in  constructing  a  useless,  wobbly,  altogether 
horrible  little  house  out  of  wire  and  dried  peas. 
It  was  characteristic  of  Mrs.  White  to  select 
from  the  comprehensive  inventory  of  the 
world's  possible  building  materials,  wire  and 
dried  peas. 

If  Mrs.  White  had  now  and  then  betrayed 
the  impatience,  the  annoyance,  the  despair  she 
had  every  reason  to  experience  over  my  stupid 
ity  and  awkwardness,  if  at  the  "  psychological 
moment  "  she  had  occasionally  spoken  sharply, 
blown  me  up  as  did  the  teachers  later  at  the 
public  school,  the  effect  I  am  convinced  would 
have  been  definite  and  salutary.  But  hers  was 
the  haggard  benevolence  of  the  child-gardener 
in  its  most  indestructible  form.  All  day  long 
sweetness  and  light  glared  from  her  eyes  like 
pharos  rays  that  faileth  not  because  they've 

253 


PREJUDICES 

been  wound  up.  There  was  in  the  loving  ex 
pression  around  her  mouth  something  appall 
ingly  inanimate,  objective,  detachable;  one 
felt  that  it  hadn't  grown  there,  it  had  been  put. 
It  bore  about  the  same  relation  to  reality  as 
does  the  art  of  the  confectioner.  It  lay  against 
her  teeth  like  the  thin  white  icing  on  a  cake, 
and  the  hand  that  itched  to  box  an  ear  faltered 
in  its  flight  pausing  to  caress  a  curl.  It  ter 
rified  me  to  realize  that  the  perishable,  nar 
row  strips  of  glazed,  colored  paper  we  tried  to 
weave  into  mats,  and  the  dried  peas  with 
which  I  finally  builded  better  than  I  knew  were, 
even  as  the  hairs  of  our  heads,  all  numbered. 
This  was  for  the  purpose  of  teaching  us  neat 
ness  and  thrift — the  husbanding  of  our  re 
sources.  To  crumple  the  former  or  scatter  the 
latter  was,  we  knew,  a  crime,  but  Mrs.  White's 
method  of  calling  our  attention  to  it  was 
merely  an  insult  to  the  intelligence.  The  pun 
ishment  \vas  a  deliberate  misfit,  an  elaborately 
artificial  evasion  of  the  point  at  issue.  When, 
for  instance,  a  dried  pea  would  slip  through 
my  clumsy  fingers  and  rattle  over  the  uncarpet- 
254 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

ted  floor  with  what  sounded  to  me  like  the  de 
tonations  of  artillery,  Mrs.  White  never  told 
me  to  wake  up  and  be  more  careful  of  what  I 
was  doing.  Instead  she  would  coo  like  a  phi 
landering  pigeon  and  murmur : 

"  Why,  laddie — what  would  the  hungry 
little  birds  say  if  they  were  to  see  all  that 
nice  food  wasted ! "  When  panic-stricken 
at  the  number  of  my  crumpled  failures  I 
feloniously  thrust  them  into  my  pocket,  she 
would  fish  them  out  with  sweet  amaze,  ex 
claiming  : 

"Why,  dearie — how  did  these  get  here? 
Does  any  little  girl  or  boy  know  how  all  these 
poor  little  strips  of  paper  got  into  the  very 
bottom  of  Charlie's  dark  pocket?  "  When,  as 
once  in  so  often  happened,  I  would  "  all  alone 
beweep  my  outcast  state,  And  trouble  deaf 
heaven  with  my  bootless  cries,  And  look  upon 
myself  and  curse  my  fate,"  she  never  told  me 
to  stop  at  once  and  behave  myself;  she  would 
open  her  eyes  to  their  incredulous  roundest, 
slightly  drop  her  lower  jaw,  wonderingly  scan 
every  face  and  then  purr : 
255 


PREJUDICES 

"  Why,  manny — what's  become  of  all  the 
smiles?" 

There  was  invariably  a  reply  to  these  in 
quiries  and  it  was  almost  as  invariably  fur 
nished  by  one  Adelaide  Winkle,  a  dreadful 
child,  but  one  more  sinned  against,  I  now  ap 
preciate,  than  sinning.  Forced  to  the  limit  in 
the  hothouse  of  the  home,  and  deeply  imbedded 
in  the  fertilizing  approval  of  Mrs.  White,  she 
was  in  all  our  gay  little  parterre  the  most 
brilliant  and  the  most  noxious  bloom.  At  the 
age  of  seven  she  already  had  the  executive  air 
of  a  woman  who  has  long  presided  over  meet 
ings.  She  also  played  the  piano,  danced  fancy 
dances,  sang,  recited,  wore  three  rings,  a  neck 
lace  and  a  red  plush  dress.  I  hated  her,  even 
more  if  possible  than  I  hated  Mrs.  White,  for 
she  not  only  kept  an  eye  on  my  shortcomings, 
she  formulated  them  into  ready  words  and  by 
request  smugly  proclaimed  them.  But  it  was 
the  manner  in  which  Mrs.  White  exploited  her 
before  strangers  that  most  enraged  me.  When 
visitors  appeared,  as  they  often  did,  for  a 
kindergarten  under  cultivation  was  a  decided 
256 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

novelty,  Adelaide  was  called  upon  to  execute 
her  entire  program  from  A  to  Izzard.  She 
sang,  she  elocuted  "  Bobolink,  spink,  spank, 
bobolink,"  she  played  her  show  piece  ("  Fairy 
Chimes")  on  the  piano,  she  withdrew  to  an 
adjoining  room  and  tripped  coquettishly  in 
again,  strewing,  like  the  springtime,  an  armful 
of  tissue-paper  roses,  and  last  of  all  she  gave 
with  experiments  a  short  discourse  on  geog 
raphy  that  brought  tears  to  the  eyes  of  the 
most  criminal.  The  experiments  were  evolved 
in  sight  of  the  audience  with  the  aid  of  a  large 
wooden  trayful  of  sand  and  a  tin  dipperful 
of  water.  Under  Adelaide's  precocious  fingers 
these  helpless  elements  gave  a  presumably  cor 
rect  rendering  of  the  Book  of  Genesis  in  action, 
becoming  at  her  will  a  continent,  a  river,  a 
lake,  an  island,  a  peninsula,  a  mountain.  One 
downward  thrust  of  an  unerring  thumb  upon  a 
soggy  peak  and  lo!  the  mountain  was  a  vol 
cano  which,  Adelaide  always  ended  the  lecture 
by  informing  us,  "  Spouts  when  in  a  state  of 
ac-tiv-it-y,  fire,  smoke,  glow-ing  stones  and 
mol-tennn  law-vaw."  Powerless  to  protest, 
257 


PREJUDICES 

and  crushed  beneath  the  weight  of  my  own  in 
competence,  I  have  sat  through  the  perform 
ance  of  this  revolting  rite  as  often  as  three 
times  in  a  single  morning. 

Revenge  came  slowly.  It  took  nineteen 
years  to  arrive,  but  it  arrived.  Unduly  fa 
miliar  in  childhood  with  continents  and  dizzy 
heights,  Adelaide,  as  she  matured,  reached  out, 
expanded,  longed  to  become  a  world-power.  At 
the  age  of  twenty-six,  therefore,  she  eloped 
with  a  French  "  count,"  who  not  only  failed  to 
observe  the  convention  of  proving  to  be  a 
waiter  or  a  hairdresser,  he  absolutely  failed  to 
be  anything  at  all  and  Adelaide  ever  since  has 
had  to  support  him. 

At  eleven  o'clock  we  took  a  dejected  orphan- 
asylum  walk  about  the  suburban  streets  in 
two  long  lines  led  by  the  older  pupils  of  the 
more  advanced  school  downstairs  and  followed 
by  Mrs.  White  who,  by  constantly  run 
ning  back  and  forth  in  order  to  satisfy  her 
self  that  no  one  was  neglecting  to  "  observe 
nature,"  must  have  covered  miles  to  our  blocks. 
How  we  all  loathed  nature!  I  loved  animals 

258 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

and  plants,  clouds  and  rain,  snow  and  sun 
shine  then  as  I  do  now,  but  "  Nature  "  was 
something  quite  different.  I  don't  believe  we 
ever  knew  what  it  was  and  probably  connected 
the  term  in  our  minds  not  with  the  works  of 
God  themselves  but  with  the  inescapable  obli 
gation  of  perpetually  fussing  about  them.  I 
without  doubt  would  have  ended  by  becoming 
very  fond  of  the  White  Maria's  shaggy  old 
ponies,  but  the  labored  pretense  that  we  were 
all  dying  to  bring  them  a  handful  of  oats  for 
their  Thanksgiving  dinner  and  a  dozen  other 
pretenses  concerning  them  ended  by  preventing 
it.  Birds  were  really  wonderful,  heavenly 
creatures  to  watch  and  examine,  but  weeks  of 
prattle  about  the  Christmas  present  (seeds, 
bread-crumbs  and  more  oats)  of  birds  we  had 
never  seen,  merely  resulted  in  a  band  of  orni 
thological  cynics.  This  fictitious  passion  for 
just  birds — disembodied,  abstract  birds,  that 
Mrs.  White  entirely  imagined  for  us  and 
widely  advertised — was  taken  seriously  by  our 
families  for  years.  My  grandmother  fondly 
believed  in  it  to  the  last  and  almost  embittered 

259 


PREJUDICES 

my  young  life  by  bequeathing  in  her  will 
three  beautiful  family  portraits  to  my  brothers, 
and  to  me  the  "  nature  lover,"  the  unwilling 
product  of  Mrs.  White's,  a  set  of  Audubon ! 

On  our  return  from  the  walk  Mrs.  White  in 
spected  our  lunch-baskets,  confiscating  what 
she  considered  injurious  to  our  digestions  and 
teeth  and  allowing  us  to  fortify  ourselves 
against  further  blessed  play  and  blessed  work 
.with  the  remains.  I  have  often  wondered 
what  actually  became  of  the  cake  and  candy 
she  daily  took  from  us  "  for  our  own  good," 
and  I  shouldn't  be  surprised  if  she  scattered  it 
along  the  sidewalk  or  threw  it  into  passing 
carriages.  It  would  have  been  a  natural  reac 
tion  from  her  incessant  official  pother  about 
"  neatness  and  thrift,"  but  at  the  time  we  all 
of  course  firmly  believed  that  she  put  the  loot 
away  in  a  pantry  and  that  the  whole  White 
family  lived  on  it  for  weeks. 

Almost    everything    we    learned    at    Mrs. 

White's  was  sure  to  be  incorrect  to  the  point 

of  imbecility.     For  I   don't  know  how   long 

after  leaving  there  I  took  it  for  granted  that 

260 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

a  thoughtful  Creator  had  supplied  dear  Bossy 
with  a  "  dewlap  "  in  order  that  she  could  wipe 
dry  each  mouthful  of  wet  grass  before  eating 
it. 

"  When  Bossy  goes  out  to  the  fields  in  the 
morning  for  her  breakfast,  this  long,  soft  fold 
you  see  here  under  her  neck  "  (pointing  to  the 
picture)  "  swings  from  side  to  side  brushing 
away  the  damp  and  chilly  dew,"  Mrs.  White 
had  told  us,  and  I  need  scarcely  dwell  on  the 
disappointment  and  sense  of  injury  I  experi 
enced  when  I  subsequently  sought  Bossy  in  her 
graminaceous  lair  and  watched  her  dewlap 
quite  otherwise  engaged.  But  even  so,  Mrs. 
White  is  no  more,  and  anyhow  I  was  always 
a  facile  relenter.  At  times  I  have  been  even 
grateful  for  Mrs.  White's.  There  was  for  in 
stance  the  mystery  of  Mary  Blake  and  the 
mystery  of  the  White  Maria.  I  have  often 
been  grateful  for  them. 

Mary  Blake  was  an  overgrown  girl  in  the 

school  downstairs.     She  was  a  most  pervasive 

lass — "  a  perfect   romp."     We   all   knew   her 

well.     She  belonged  to  a  family  prominent  in 

261 


PREJUDICES 

our  growing  town,  and  although  my  family 
and  hers  were  not  intimate  they  no  doubt 
would  have  thought  they  were  had  they  unex 
pectedly  met  for  instance  on  the  spiral  stair 
way  of  7  Rue  Scribe.  There  were  two  sons 
and  four  daughters  in  Mary's  family  and 
none  of  them  was  named  Jane.  This  is  im 
portant.  Years  elapsed.  I  had  spent  consid 
erable  time  abroad,  I  had  been  occupied  in 
growing  up,  in  going  to  school,  in  preparing 
for  college.  There  were  still  four  Blake  girls, 
but  my  interest  in  them  was  vague,  collective. 
Then  one  day  I  heard  of  the  marriage  of  Jane 
Blake,  which  surprised  me  somewhat  as  there 
had  never  been  a  Jane  Blake.  This  led  a  short 
time  later  to  my  expressing  to  Mrs.  Blake  a 
belated  interest  in  Mary,  at  which  Mrs.  Blake 
looked  mystified  for  a  moment  and  then  said, 
"  I  think  you  must  mean  Susan."  I  didn't 
mean  Susan  but  I  refrained  from  saying  so, 
and  since  then  I  have  been  haunted  by  the 
mystery  of  Mary  Blake.  Apparently  there  is 
no  Mary  Blake  and  never  was  one,  although  in 
answer  to  my  feverish  questionings  several 
262 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

persons  who  were  at  Mrs.  White's  with  her 
have  assured  me  that  they  remember  her  per 
fectly.  Every  now  and  then  I  meet  Jane  Blake 
and  talk  to  her,  wondering  the  while  if  she 
can  be  Mary.  That  she  is  dark  and  Mary  was 
blonde  is  perhaps  negligible.  Once  I  sat  next 
to  Jane  at  dinner  and  when,  after  a  pause  in 
our  conversation,  I  said,  "  Come,  now — aren't 
you  really  your  sister  who  died  ?  "  She  an 
swered  coldly  that  none  of  her  sisters  had  ever 
died  and  immediately  afterward  refused  to  let 
the  servant  help  her  to  any  more  champagne. 

The  mystery  of  the  White  Maria  I  have 
never  tried  to  solve.  It  is  enough  to  know 
that  it  was  and  to  wonder  if  I  shall  ever  again 
see  anything  so  lovely.  The  White  Maria,  as 
has  been  mentioned,  was  a  large,  square  box 
of  black  oilcloth.  It's  inner  surface,  however, 
was  white,  soiled  to  a  neutral  gray.  On  our 
outward  journeys  when  I  noticed  this  at  all  it 
was  only  to  feel  the  tragedy  of  life  with  a 
greater  intensity.  But  on  the  return  .  .  . 
To  state  in  words  what  we  saw  when  returning 
gives  but  little  idea  of  it.  We  were  always 
18  263 


PREJUDICES 

tired,  silent  and  a  trifle  sleepy  when  we  started 
for  home,  and  we  at  once  leaned  back  and 
quietly  watched  for  It.  It  often  appeared  but 
sometimes  it  refused  to  show  itself  for  days, 
and  I  then  used  to  wonder  if  I  had  ever  really 
seen  it.  The  perpetual  fascination  it  had  for 
us  wras  a  most  complicated  one,  consisting  as  it 
did  of  the  mystery,  the  beauty,  the  unreality 
and  the  reality  of  the  thing  itself,  together  with 
the  fact  that  Mrs.  White  was  somehow  being 
thwarted.  The  black  canopy  of  the  White 
Maria,  in  a  word,  sought  to  imprison  us,  to 
impose  an  impenetrable  barrier  between  us  and 
the  outside  world,  but  as  we  jogged  along, 
the  houses,  the  trees,  the  horses,  the  wagons 
and  the  people  we  passed  were  reproduced  in 
miniature  on  one  of  the  inside  walls.  The  de 
tails  were  always  clear  enough  to  let  us  know- 
where  w-e  were;  frequently  they  were  perfect. 
The  little  panorama,  furthermore,  was  with 
out  color,  which  gave  it  an  additional,  ghostly 
charm.  I  have  never  been  hypnotized,  but  I 
think  in  staring  at  this  dreamlike,  dissolving 
procession  I  used  to  be  very  near  the  hypnotic 
264 


MRS.    WHITE'S 

state.  At  times  when  the  White  Maria  drew 
up  at  our  front  door  I  was  asleep  and  it  would 
take  me  half  an  hour  or  more  to  get  back  again 
into  my  body — I  can  remember  the  sensation 
even  if  I  can't  describe  it.  The  moving-picture 
shows  of  to-day  seem  to  me  like  a  crude  and 
vulgar  attempt  to  recall  and  commercialize  the 
age  when  we  were  mystics  and  had  visions. 


(i) 


THE    END 


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